How can I get more survivability for this melee ranger build?

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

https://pastebin.com/bLqXB8Wc


ok i had a play with ur tree, this might be a rough idea of what id aim to do personally by lvl94 given what were starting with. capped spell suppression, 5500 life, 2.6 million peak dps.


it would involve getting a better large cluster, i honestly dunno the price on them ive never bought one, i just roll my own using harvest. slam em with attack more common or something until they hit 3 prop, ive got dozens by this point. this is the one i used in the pob

i switched to raider, i just feel like raider gives way more bang than deadeye.


just for interest, you asked about damage earlier, i copied over some other items from my stash into your pob and pushed the build to lvl99, just so you can get a picture for understanding when ppl on the forums talk about x number for life or dps etc and your wondering what theyre doing, what that would actually look like as a setup. this is a rough tree with about 6k life and 7.3 million peak dps at lvl99, starting from the tree above and then just adding in the extra 5 levels of points and the item upgrades, pushing the support gems to the awakened versions, 21/20 gems etc, few other skill changes like getting frostbite in there.

https://pastebin.com/xBRXPqE6

Thanks!
I can see how my build can develop a bunch more in the next 5-6 levels, but 99 is out of the question for now. I've never had fun playing one single build so much, so I don't really want to plan a tree with that many points in mind.

Is Wind-up good enough to give you power charges when you hae 70-80 chance to crit? 10% chance to generate a charge 20% of the time is 2% chance to generate a charge on any attack. Am I missing something here?

7-8 million dps sounds nice as well on that endgame tree, but those items are extremely out of my reach. I can't hope to reach that any time this year I think.

I do like some of the other ideas in there. I'll try to get a abyss belt with %life on it and a good jewel to socket into it. I expect it will be someting too expensive to me at this point in time, but at least it is another goal to work towards. And maybe there are better jewels out there for the tombfist.

I think Tombfist with 2 good jewels used to be the best thing in the glove item slot. Is it still the case for melee builds or would a good crafted item be an improvement? Also, for some reason PoB doesn't increase my damage when I click on "enemy is Intimidated" checkbox, so I'm starting to wonder if it really is helping for my melee attacks like I thought it was?

What kind of chest piece would you suggest me going for in the near future? After my latest changes, I only gain 20ms from the Queen, so when I equip the Nightblade support I can easily drop her.
Should I go for Armor base since armor is so much better than evasion? Should I focus on %damage reduction and %life or maybe I shoul try to get frenzy charge generation on it?

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TemjinGold wrote:

1) You can remove the dex node to the right of Intuition.

Yeah, I picked it just so i can respec the entire branch thats going off of Finesse. I'll tidy it up as soon as I ge the new cluster.

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TemjinGold wrote:

2) That conc effect support in your helmet is hurting your Enduring Cry. I would remove the support entirely. Your warchief is not doing meaningful damage with or without it because you need more than 2 links for it to do good damage. The warchief's primary purpose is to buff your guy. Conc effect hurts that by shrinking the range.

Thanks! I didn't realise it will support Enduring Cry! I'll stick Increased duration or Vaal Lightning trap in there when I finish work today.

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TemjinGold wrote:

3) There are a lot of gem sockets dedicated to different types of defense mechanics. You have 2 healing pots AND Enduring Cry AND Steelskin on CWDT. On top of this, you also run Arctic Armour. You are investing a ton into defense but not doing so effectively.

Well they might not be the most effective, but this is the setup that I moved to after I made my first post in this thread. I just put on some things that I could fit in 5 minutes or so. Isn't steelskin + cwdt a good combo? And there's no problem with using enduring cry, right?

AA isn't the best thing ever, I know it is Less damage and doesnt stack additively with other layers of defense, but it fits in currently with Hatred & Precision. Also when I fight I do stay in a single spot in order to attack, so AA should be doing *some* work, right?

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TemjinGold wrote:

4) You spent five points to get 15% life from Written in Blood (the other stuff you get going there is peanuts). That's 3% a point which is incredibly inefficient.

Originally, I think the plan was to do the traveling points first and then pick up the life points on level up when leveling up gets slower. But yeah, I agree, so I'll respec those and move south to pick up hp & the new cluster over there.

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TemjinGold wrote:

I agree with the guy above that Raider is the much better choice if you have to play a Ranger. Deadeye gives you pretty much nothing.

I do have a bunch other Rangers leveled up that I can send the gear to and continue with them, but I do love having Tailwind and attacking super fast!
I can't afford one of those pairs of boots that give Tailwind.... If I could get one of those I'd switch to Raider in a hearbeat!

I'll keep Raider in mind though. If frenzy charge generation is a big problem that'd be a decent opportunity. I saw that in the 2.6million dps version of the build 600k dps was coming from the frenzy charges alone, so I know they are important as ever.

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TemjinGold wrote:

I think the macro issue you are facing is that deep down you want to play someone big and beefy but you decide to pick one of the squishiest character classes for you build. Rangers are generally fast glass cannons. If you go completely against the grain to force this character to be tanky, you will end up with a really rough time as you can see here.

That's not to say you can't make this effectively tanky--I would get rid of a lot of the defense choices you made and instead run Grace and Determination. Invest into the Charisma wheel, maybe even get an annoint for Sovereignty, and pick up a Grace reservation mastery somewhere. You will find that doing so with a good chest piece (since you are in Standard, one of my favorite budget dex chest pieces is Fox's Fortune) plus a Jade and Granite flask will significantly mitigate the damage you take in a way that is far more effective than the entire defense setup you have here.

Is it really worth going through this route when a big part of my dps is tied to Hatred? I don't think I can fit Grace & determination with it.
I am steadily working towards getting level 3 enlighten, but I guess I'll need up to level 4 with some passive investment and even then I'm not sure it can work.

I do have a 21lvl Grace and I'd love to try to get a 21 Determination, but can I get a meaningful armour rating when I have 0 armor on my gear and 0 armor increases on the tree?

Does Fox's Fortune provide anything over the Queen? It givees more evasion, but no resists and no life and I don't really have one of those 6linked lying around.
Isn't a Rare chest with defensive/offensive stats better? Or maybe Daresso's Defiance, I see that it has received a nice buff? Or maybe a legacy Lightning Coil, I have one of those lying around?

P.S. Is frostbite Better than Assasin's mark right now for this build? I guess I can check it out in PoB later tonight, but I didn't realise I could be using the wrong curse/mark. Ass Mark used to be great for crit builds...

I don't really know how to play with only 1 Life flask. I've seen streamers do it over the years, but I've never felt OK just relying on a single instant pot. THat's why i have 2 life flasks 1 atziri for offensive and 1 defensive = Taste of Hate + 1 ms flask for fast traveling.

I could try again with a 4 utility flasks, but I'm not sure I can make it work.

I understand your hesitation but let me try to explain:

Your character has 19k evasion and no armour right now. That means you take full damage from everything physical that hits you. In the old days, this was fine because armour was junk back then. But as of last league, GGG reworked the armour and evasion formula to the point where investment into it was strong.

You need 2 heal pots with your current setup because you are taking a ton of huge hits (due to no armour). If you have a granite flask (do a increased %armour suffix) + determination, you will get fairly significant phys mitigation meaning the hits you take will be much smaller. The Jade flask plus Grace will mean you get hit FAR less often. Basically you currently need 2 pots to feel comfortable because your setup gets hit MUCH more often and for more damage each time. This is why I said some of the things you set up are a self-fulfilling prophecy.

That's why you will be fine with 1 healing flask. If you are still worried, take the Ryslatha pantheon (heal flasks gain 3 charges every 3 seconds if you haven't used it recently) as that will keep your heal topped up in boss fights.

If you get the Charisma wheel with 15% efficiency mastery and use your enlighten (doesn't need to be L4), you will be able to have Grace + Determination + Hatred. At worst you may want a helmet enchant for Determination or Hatred reservation efficiency (shouldn't be expensive). Get Grace efficiency mastery from an evasion wheel somewhere.

I personally don't like CWDT w/ Steelskin/Immortal Call/etc. The reason is Steelskin only lasts 1.5 seconds and the shield you get is not 100% mitigation (it only takes 70% so the remaining health you have needs to weather 30%). When it trips, you need to be able to regain all your life back reliably in that time for it to be of any use. I'd rather use the sockets to reduce the damage/number of hits I take or up my damage instead. Basically I completely stopped using CWDT a year ago and never looked back.

What I would instead do is set Steelskin to left-click and manually use Enduring Cry if you need a heal and your pot is empty (which if you have good armour and evasion, should be almost never). If you get a lot of armour though, use Molten Shell instead (my current league character's Molten Shell lasts over 6 seconds and blocks just a hair under 10k).

ok so much to unpack, so many threads so might be long post.

"

ivkoto77777 wrote:

Thanks!
I can see how my build can develop a bunch more in the next 5-6 levels, but 99 is out of the question for now. I've never had fun playing one single build so much, so I don't really want to plan a tree with that many points in mind.

ya i never plan builds to 99 either. the reason i linked u that second tree was more so you would be able to visualise the workings of it. a lot of times on the forums youll see these standard league dps warriors with their 5 million, 10 million, 20 million, 40 million dps type builds giving it all the bigman talk etc. what are they doing? how are they achieving that?

its not necessarily real dps, its their peak dps that they probably cant sustain beyond a burst in an optimal situation. but theyre probably lvl98-100, they probably have top top level gear. we drop down that build from 6k life to 4k life, we add another 2 damage flasks, we add in better rings and a dps chest and you can see how we could then get 15 million dps even from a pretty zdps skill like frostblades right?

i wouldnt advise it tho. but when you ehar that sort of talk around the forums at least now you can picture it, you understand how to put a build like that together if you had the resources and the inclination.


those are my items i used but i dont have 7.3 million dps on my frostblades ranger, last time i played frostblades i had about 3-4 million dps depending on my buffs being up etc, but way more tanky than that 7 mill version. my character was lvl97 i think. i have lvl99 chars, but i never plan a build beyond 94, i just get to 95, 96, and then im respeccing the char later and ok, ive got lvl96 points to play with so i make the build for that amount of points. 94 is achievable if u put in some grind so from fresh i plan to about 94.








right so theres talk here about defences. theres so many ways to skin this cat. my frostblades ranger is pretty tanky, ill start by explaining what i did on mine. not saying this is how u should do it, but its an option.



my ranger has the equiv defences of having around 76,000 armour and 35,000 evasion without using grace or determination. i run hatred, herald of ice, precision etc.


the way that works is I have a legacy lightning coil, a taste of hate, high evasion on my hat and shield giving me 17,300 total evasion, i blind on hit and im a raider (which grants 10% more chance to evade).

taste of hate + lightning coil give a total of 70% of physical damage taken as elemental, of which you resist 75% of that damage. so thats a total of 52.5% physical damage reduction against any size of hit. Were evasion so we dont care about bursts of small phys damage attacks, we evade 80% of them, we are worried about being 1 shot by physical damage. I have 7500 life, so I can survive a physical hit of 15,000 damage. in order to survive that off the back of just having armour from the spreadsheet calc im looking at here based on the recent armour changes youre going to need about 76,000 armour.

I have 80% chance to evade, without the more chance to evade granted by raiders avatar of the chase and having blind on hit youd need about 35,000 evasion for an 80% evade chance.

so, to get 35k evasion + 76k armour without any auras simply from our gear = lightning coil, taste of hate, high evasion shield, high evasion hat, blind on hit chance, raider ascendancy.

that, imo, is how you play evasion. and it was so stupidly effective, for basically no investment your defences outstripped even a lot of heavily invested armour characters, it was so absurdly broken that they nerfed lightning coil down from 40% phys taken as lightning to 30% and nerfed taste of hate from 30% to 15%.



i see you have a 20% taste of hate right? i dunno if youve got any old coils laying around or not, with a lego coil thats 45% phys reduction. given we were looking at about 5500 life, that means you could survive a phys hit of 9,800 damage, which would take roughly 40,000 armour to replicate, give or take. thats an insane amount of phys reduction.

people used to know about this, it was meta for a while way wayyy back, its largely been forgotten about. i havent run the maths on a new coil + toh but with the old setup you had 95% chance to evade + phys reduction that beat at the time 150k armour + 75% chance to dodge + spell dodge + 7-8k life. it was so stupidly broken before they nerfed coil/toh/blind.


coil comes with -% lightning resist, queen has triple resists, so theres the catch, you need enough res on your other gear to carry the coil.





you can go auras, you can get a chest with armour, or armour and evasion. these sort of things are in the current mod pool



youre not gonna get the same sort of defence as a coil + raider from something like that, and you wont even get the same amount of defence from wearing that AND running determination. but using that with at least determination will be more tanky than what you currently have, no doubt there.

is it worth it? would just better damage + more health actually make the build feel alright without needing any of this? i dunno m8, only you can answer that its all about how it feels to you playing it. maybe youre fine with just the queen once uve got capped spell suppression.

raider has 40% spell suppression. it helps a lot when ur trying to cap that stat.






ok, regarding losing tailwind and being slow as a result. raider has permanent onslaught with 130% increased onslaught effect, thats 100% uptime 46% movespeed and 46% attack speed. shes a zippy little critter too.

i play with 2 life flasks. i know the meta is 1 life flask, i see streamers do it, i just have always used 2 life flasks and my reactions, instincts, its all tied to 2 life flasks so i keep them as is.

technically u can get more having another utlity flask there. but then theres also those death clips of people like raizqt amd ziz etc where they have emptied their 1 life flask and are now stuck and die because they couldnt log out and had no potions in the heat of a fight. it might be once in a blue moon i actually need it but i always have 2 flasks.


most of my builds are ci with 5 util flasks tbh, but on life builds i like



99% of the time its overkill, but its just what im used to.









can you sustain off windup re: power charges.

heres the thing, you only have these super high levels of crit chance when you have power charges, so when you dont have them windup can get you them. really where you need power charges most is against a boss. you have assassins mark, you can use the new mark on hit support, that gives you powercharge on hit too against the marked enemy.

so with these sort of dps levels you just instagib mobs even without ur pcharges, when u dont have them windup can get you them, once you have them windup isnt great at sustaining them alone but then assassins mark will trigger on rare enemies and killing them will guarantee a pcharge which refreshes them. you can get pcharge duration on ur jewels from harvest crafts.

its not gonna be 100% pcharges all the time, but most of the time when you need them you will have them in combo with assassins mark is my experience.

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

ok, regarding losing tailwind and being slow as a result. raider has permanent onslaught with 130% increased onslaught effect, thats 100% uptime 46% movespeed and 46% attack speed. shes a zippy little critter too.

dont take the onslaught branch, take the frenzy branch go for frenzy scaling, its strictly better than 46% ms and ias, and you could get standard 20% onslaught elsewhere anyways

i think last time i played that char i had both, i had avatar of the chase with way of the poacher and quartz infusion.

getting perm normal onslaught elsewhere wasnt really an option and 130% increased onslaught with the more evade chance is just too nice for mapping which is all i was doing on that character. speed > everything.


i have gone back and forth on them, theres been times when ive had avatar of the slaughter and avatar of the veil. a case can be made for any combo of them i think.

"

jewdas12 wrote:

"

Snorkle_uk wrote:

ok, regarding losing tailwind and being slow as a result. raider has permanent onslaught with 130% increased onslaught effect, thats 100% uptime 46% movespeed and 46% attack speed. shes a zippy little critter too.

dont take the onslaught branch, take the frenzy branch go for frenzy scaling, its strictly better than 46% ms and ias, and you could get standard 20% onslaught elsewhere anyways

I used to be a way of the poacher advocate too until I actually played them both separately. On paper the way of the poacher is much better but when playing I found unconditional 100% uptime felt a lot better than having gaps here and there. To each their own but the Onslaught route is definitely valid.

yeah it depends on factors. if you can fit in onslaught + tailwind boots then you start to get a good case for ignoring avatar of the chase completely. cause i was using a coil the only way to make that work is heavy resists on other slots...



if you wanna wear tombfists or maybe a starkonjas that can be swapped for an abyssus or a devotos on occasions then you really need some mega res boots.

alternatively you can go a rare hat perhaps



get even more phys taken as ele, that might free up the boots. 2tone boots tho, so much resist.


i havent really played frostblades properly in a long time now, im not sure exactly what setup id use. theres def some setups where you just go slaughter and veil, i think the immune to ailments thing was big there for a minute which really made veil super strong but now u can get freeze immune from the pantheon does it still hold the same weight?

maybe. it also depends on ur gem links, are u using cold pen? how much dps is that exposure? are you using frostbomb already?

OP: I took the liberty of rebuilding your tree to show you what I mean by what efficiency can do.

Here is the pob: https://pastebin.com/AXkbg1iN

Here are the parameters I worked with:

1) You had 109 points spent on your tree so I held myself to the same (you technically should have 111 at L88 so if you don't have those 2 points then you missed a campaign quest or two somewhere).

2) I wanted you to not be less tanky despite having more damage. You will notice at first glance this build seems to have ~300 less HP than yours. However, if you go to the calculations page, your build's effective health pool is 15,006 (this is your hp plus your defenses factored in) while mine is almost three times that at 44,608. Maximum hit taken is also almost double yours across the board.

3) I wanted you to have a lot more damage despite not changing your gear to be a lot better (more expensive). You'll notice you now have almost THREE TIMES the dps you had before.

Changes I did make:

1) I added a single Large ring Thread of Hope. I did not optimize the roll since you are budget. Do note, you are no longer res capped because Thread of Hope has some minus res, so you do need to make this up somewhere.

2) I added a mana reservation enchant to your hat. This should not be expensive and you can get it for either Hatred or Determination (same exact outcome). Don't get it for Grace because you already have some on the tree, which waters it down.

3) I switched your amulet annoint to Panopticon. This is similar in cost to your divine wrath but significantly better.

4) I changed your gems (disabled all your old ones and added new ones). Arcanist Brand allows you to just plop it down and continue with your business. When it attaches to something (generally the boss), it will follow that guy and automatically cast the linked spells on him/her. This is much better than you manually trying to cast those things while worrying about fighting. Leave it at Level 1 because higher level doesn't make it better (but will cost more mana). You do want to max the quality on it though (get a 1/23 if you can) because quality determines how often it casts.

5) I swapped out Phys to Lightning for Nightblade support. All I changed in Configuration is to switch on your Elusive (which activates Nightblade's damage).

Summary of what happened:

1) Despite the HP number looking lower, your character is now roughly twice as tanky as you were before. This will be even better when you cap the res. This will be significantly better if you add a Jade and Granite flask as I recommended.

2) You now do almost 3x the damage you did before.

3) The only expense currency-wise is the Large Thread of Hope. There is no need for cluster jewels even.

4) You are now 100% elemental ailment immune (50% from Raider, 20% from Thick Skin wheel, 30% from Crystal Skin wheel).

5) You are now immune to Corrupted Blood. If you don't know what this is yet, you will thank me when you run into it later on.

6) You now have 100% Spell Suppression (half damage from all spells that hit you).

7) The Life Raker claw wheel I took for you gives you a ton of flat life/mana gained on hit. This is good because Frost Blades hits a lot of targets and you now hit EIGHT times per second (compared to 5 times before).

8) You were worried about losing Tailwind and feeling slow. You previously hit 5 times per second and had 59% move. You now hit 8 times per second and have 120% move without Elusive on (which should be close to never) and 172% move with maximum Elusive. I would honestly dump the quicksilver pot at this point.

9) You previously had ~89% crit chance with Assassin's Mark on and 95% chance to hit with Precision. You now have 100% crit chance AND 100% chance to hit without Precision.

10) You are short 1 intelligence now. I would honestly just lower the level of Frost bomb to fix that. The damage on that skill is peanuts, you want it for the effect.

So where do you go from here? Well as you level, here's what I would take (in this order):

1) Get the Fangs of Frost wheel at the bottom.

2) If you have more levels beyond that: Choose from this list:

A) Look at the Claws of the Falcon masteries and see if you like those.

B) Take From the Shadows Wheel (I know you aren't daggers, that doesn't matter) and choose one of those masteries. Lots of strong stuff there (Elusive 40% crit multi and Crits have Culling Strike are the two best).

C) Take Master of Blades wheel.