From Zero to Hero - How?

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magicrectangle wrote:

Well, for one thing you've chosen exactly the worst weapons for elemental cleave. 1.1 speed? Horrible. Get faster weapons. Just buy them from a vendor or something, even if they don't have as much elemental damage.

What's a good attack speed for cleavers, then? I had assumed it was mostly just "find whatever weapon has the most elemental damage" because of how WED multiplies things. Another reason why I use those are because of the lack of a serious DEX requirement, which let me be a little more flexible on my jewelry. Though I won't be playing this character again, I'll keep weapon speed in mind for the future.

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You have a 4L hat which is great. Swap out heavy strike (wtf?) for life on hit, and you're good to go. Depending what gems you have available you may want to drop item quantity and chrom one of the sockets to green for faster attacks. You could also leave it red and put blood magic if you grow weary of spamming mana flasks.

I used Heavy Strike as a single-target skill. Threw it with my WED just to try and eek out some more damage in it; the Item Quantity was mostly in the hopes that I could get more rares / uniques.

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Wrath and anger are unleveled? What's that about? That's where all your damage comes from. I guess wrath maybe you don't have enough int at the moment or something, but what about anger? Seriously while leveling (and really up to end game until you get good gear) auras provide a huge chunk of your damage.

In the early levels, reserving both of them at once just uses so much mana reserve that when running both of them, I kept them unleveled until I could increase my mana pool a bit. I was intending to level them up slowly as I could afford to.

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Without any twink gear I found my elemental cleave character to be one of the easiest to level. Certainly much easier than my dual totem or my summoner.

I've found it a lot easier - and faster, for that matter - to level with Cleave until A3, in which I mostly just have problems with things I've already managed - the dogs in Docks, or Piety herself are two major hurdles I had troubles with.

On a different note, taking everyone's advice to build a ranged character, I worked up a Ranger to L28, and fell just now to lag + big packs while trying to navigate Ancient Pyramid. I feel that I could have been more careful moving, though I was clearing the majority of mobs as I passed them (unlike my usual technique, which is basically "run past all the auras because they're annoying and I don't want to deal with them"). Maybe I should have just ignored them and moved as fast as possible through them instead?

What's your elemental resistance on your ranger?

At that level you should have ~50% resistance to all and ~10% to chaos. Since you are heading to vaal you should have try to max out lightning for his laser beam attack.

Your melee character has some ok gear but your boots and rings need to be upgraded

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smallcreation wrote:

What's a good attack speed for cleavers, then? I had assumed it was mostly just "find whatever weapon has the most elemental damage" because of how WED multiplies things.

The faster the better. There are two base types worth looking at, pretty much. 1.65 speed swords, and 1.7 speed foils. The dex requirement is often too high on the foils so most people use the swords.

What makes elemental cleave powerful is all of the off-weapon elemental damage gets added to your cleave twice - once for each weapon. These bonuses are all per swing, not per unit time. That means the faster you swing, the more damage these bonuses give. The actual damage stats on your weapon are therefor secondary to the speed. Speed is king.

That's not necessarily true for other builds. Some builds rely on the native damage of the weapon, but elemental cleave relies on adding bunches off off-weapon damage, so the faster the better.

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Item Quantity was mostly in the hopes that I could get more rares / uniques.

It is more important to focus on kill speed and defense. IIR/IIQ are things to worry about once you've beat the game and are moving into the farming stage.

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In the early levels, reserving both of them at once just uses so much mana reserve that when running both of them, I kept them unleveled until I could increase my mana pool a bit. I was intending to level them up slowly as I could afford to.

Yeah this can be tricky to work out. It is better to level anger and skip wrath than to leave them both unleveled. It is of course better yet to be able to run both. I did my ele cleaver as a witch so I had enough mana to run both fully leveled the whole time, which was awesome. Blood magic keystone is not uncommon for an ele cleaver who starts on that end of the tree instead - and again, you can run both wrath and anger leveled. Blood magic is a temporary thing, you don't intend to use it (usually) in your final build but it helps a lot while leveling until you can get your mana/reserve situation sorted out better with gear and gem links.

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On a different note, taking everyone's advice to build a ranged character, I worked up a Ranger to L28, and fell just now to lag + big packs while trying to navigate Ancient Pyramid. I feel that I could have been more careful moving, though I was clearing the majority of mobs as I passed them (unlike my usual technique, which is basically "run past all the auras because they're annoying and I don't want to deal with them"). Maybe I should have just ignored them and moved as fast as possible through them instead?

Er, on hardcore? I clear 100% of everything so I always have a completely open retreat path (and so that I'm naturally a little over-leveled). Obviously not on races, but if there's no hurry I want that retreat path completely unobstructed.

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wrathmar wrote:

What's your elemental resistance on your ranger?

At that level you should have ~50% resistance to all and ~10% to chaos. Since you are heading to vaal you should have try to max out lightning for his laser beam attack.

My ranger's resistances were at about 20-30% for fire and cold, and close to 60% for lightning (due to a rare Topaz Ring I had found that doubled up on lightning resistance). Chaos probably wasn't much higher than 0, but I don't think I've ever had to worry about Chaos damage in normal.

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magicrectangle wrote:

Yeah this can be tricky to work out. It is better to level anger and skip wrath than to leave them both unleveled. It is of course better yet to be able to run both. I did my ele cleaver as a witch so I had enough mana to run both fully leveled the whole time, which was awesome. Blood magic keystone is not uncommon for an ele cleaver who starts on that end of the tree instead - and again, you can run both wrath and anger leveled. Blood magic is a temporary thing, you don't intend to use it (usually) in your final build but it helps a lot while leveling until you can get your mana/reserve situation sorted out better with gear and gem links.

Running BM with my auras just seems...I don't know, dangerous. Heh. Especially for a person like me who currently has trouble keeping his life from hitting zero already. I'll keep that advice in mind, though.

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smallcreation wrote:

Running BM with my auras just seems...I don't know, dangerous. Heh. Especially for a person like me who currently has trouble keeping his life from hitting zero already. I'll keep that advice in mind, though.

If you start in that area of the tree chances are you have more life to work with anyway, but obviously you don't run any % auras. Just wrath and anger. That's why it is only a stopgap and you will spec out of it later, you do want some % based auras eventually.

As an update since the last time I posted, I've been doing much better after taking resists into consideration. My current character (a ranged LA-spamming Duelist) is about midway through A3 right now, and I haven't had almost any close calls as of yet health-wise. Things aren't perfect by any means, but they have certainly been a lot smoother than my last few attempts (I not only soloed Vaal by myself, but had no issues standing and tanking the first Piety encounter thanks to my higher resistances!).

My main problems I've had to deal with now are primarly low DPS and having to chug mana pots on a constant basis - I imagine once the DPS problem is fixed, I won't have to spam my skills nearly so much, so the mana should smooth out a bit until I get suitably geared and leveled to run BM. The DPS issue is probably stemming from the fact that I haven't had a good bow replacement in some time, and it's subpar even for its own level.

Current gear:







Stat Spread:

940 HP / 18 ES
521 Armor (est. Phys. Reduction @ 33%)
~16.3 HP / sec. regen

Fire Res. - 24%
Cold Res. - 70%
Lightning Res. - 68%
Chaos Res. - 0%

Standard Attack DPS - 99.8
Poison Arrow DPS - 123.5
Lightning Arrow DPS - 110.9

I've been relying pretty heavily on Poison Arrow doing damage still, though since I switched from Rain of Arrows to LA, my AoE DPS has improved slightly. When I can get a hold of some better linked gear, I can slap on some LGoH and LMP gems and hopefully be set until I can scrounge up some currency to get Chain.

I've also been leveling a Decoy Totem on the side since the beginning / midway through A2, and though I've still been underwhelmed with it from a tanking perspective, it's nice to slap one down and not have to worry about angry mobs chasing me if I have to retreat. I've been pretty content with it as an escape tool.

I haven't been using Auras yet mainly because of my mana issues - when I can get a better bow and the gear to let me slot some auras, I'll have Wrath and Anger waiting to be used.

Appreciate all the help, everyone :)

On a sidenote, u can level anger and wrath already in a weapon in ure second weapon slot. Any other skill for that mather, just pick up some 1h with lots of sockets u need, and u can put gems in it and they gain xp as u level.

Also, nothing can TANK atm in PoE, its not like other games where u "facetank" content, but this just makes it more enjoyable to me honestly...

my barbarian in d3 could just stand in act 3 surounded and have 0 damage taken '-.-. pretty borring shit.

Another thing to note from ure description is that different bow types effect different skill gems, rain of arrows wil have the most effect of a slow/high physical bow to land "nukes", where as LA wil have the most effect from fast bows with added elemental damage.

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Boem wrote:

On a sidenote, u can level anger and wrath already in a weapon in ure second weapon slot. Any other skill for that mather, just pick up some 1h with lots of sockets u need, and u can put gems in it and they gain xp as u level.

Also, nothing can TANK atm in PoE, its not like other games where u "facetank" content, but this just makes it more enjoyable to me honestly...

my barbarian in d3 could just stand in act 3 surounded and have 0 damage taken '-.-. pretty borring shit.

Another thing to note from ure description is that different bow types effect different skill gems, rain of arrows wil have the most effect of a slow/high physical bow to land "nukes", where as LA wil have the most effect from fast bows with added elemental damage.

I knew about the "leveling gems in a second weapon slot" trick, but I feel...uncomfortable carrying around gems I'm not using, at the risk of dying and losing them. I'd much rather grind for a short while to level them up after I start using them. (Even though I stockpile all the gems I find, I have very few auras, so I like to try to keep the risk of losing useful gems like auras as low as possible - especially given my death streak currently.)

When I said I was "tanking" Piety, what I meant was basically "facetanking" her - my life, regen, and resists were suitable enough that I could sit and take the lightning spells without having to worry about moving away or kiting her. It's not something I usually do (I kited Vaal, for instance), but since I wasn't taking hardly any damage, I didn't feel the need to move. Normally I'm always on the move :)

And yes, I've been keeping my eye out for a high-elemental damage bow, but so far I've been finding mostly physical damage bows with maybe one elemental mod. Better than nothing, though, until I can find something more suitable. /shrug

Some more info for u :)

getting anger + wrath can be done by powerleveling a templar, anger u get when u slay brutus,wrath when u have done the chambers of sin quest if im not mistaken. so a quick rush with a templar to act 2 chamber of sins (i think about 1h 20 min ore so maybe less if u get good at it xD) wil get u the 2 aura's, no need to fear of losing them, start doing that when u get high lvl aura's :ppp

Also i got some bows in my stash that im not using, if u got a spare alchemy orb i could trade u one np. (i dont know the trade rates tbh, but i figure an alch trade for a rare with stats garanteed is a deal? xD) pm me if u interested. Il throw in a quiver come to think of it, i stil have one that im not using (playing my ranger a bit and i got a new one x) )