New player(crucible) Shaper help

Also i forgot to mention i will try out strenght of blood from lethal pride. Pob says it gives me 34% less damage taken with some life leech node, at the cost of my life leech recovery, i have no idea how fast the instant portion of leech heals me, i hope its enough to sustain.

Makes sense on the Endurance Charge on Melee Stun. Definitely keep that then. I would still question the Bloodthirst. Petrified Blood makes you overall worse against large single hits versus having a full life pool. You are only better if you constantly use a life flask to be full life under it. Low life has some really powerful benefits for a lot of builds (mostly spell builds) hence the drawback. You aren't using any of those things so you are taking a big penalty for not really any gain (because for you Brutality support is just straight up better than Bloodthirst. If you can get Awakened Brutality (shouldn't be expensive I think), even better.)

For the Shaper himself, if you are melee, you CAN tank everything he throws at you if that's your goal. The easiest way without changing your build too much is to replace the Quicksilver flask with a Sapphire Flask. Roll it with a prefix on the Alchemist line (25% increased effect but reduced duration). Then just hit the flask when you see the balls.

The easiest way to beat the shaper w/ melee though is patience. In other words, don't get greedy with how often you put damage on him. Wait for the moves he does where he basically locks in place (like the shaper beam) and go after him then. If you are tanky enough to survive getting scraped by 1-2 balls (with the changes I outlined, you will be) you will beat him. It won't be a quick fight but you'll win.

If you know the fight really well, you can do it without getting hit. I actually got much better at this fight because they had a "Beat the shaper without getting hit" challenge for a few leagues in the past so I had plenty of practice haha.

you probably picked the worst class to play....glad is the least played class because...its just bad right now compared to others. i would just change to champ or slayer

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Kerberosz wrote:

Also i forgot to mention i will try out strenght of blood from lethal pride. Pob says it gives me 34% less damage taken with some life leech node, at the cost of my life leech recovery, i have no idea how fast the instant portion of leech heals me, i hope its enough to sustain.

I wouldn't recommend this. But if you really want to try that, I would remove the Vaal Pact and take the Brink of Death wheel with the mastery where life regen isn't applied but you recover 1 life per every 0.1 life recovery.

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Kerberosz wrote:

Are u supposed to survive his balls and slam or not? becouse i feel like i dont understand the point of the fight. If the point is to dodge everything and not get hit, then i think its over for me becouse im old and slow. I made this flicker build so i jsut have to press 1 button and my character moves:D Dodgeing everything is fine until the last phase where a second shaper appears, then its too chaotic for me, i died so many times dodging out from the buble that zana makes becouse after the shaper ended his little teleprot dance he casted beam, and i dodge out of that into one last stray purple "bullet" and died. I tought im supposed to survive at least a single bullet. or not?

It depends entirely on you and your build. I always make it a point to face tank stuff i am not supposed to face tank because i am lazy as hell and i've got a bunch of builds that can stand in everything Shaper does so it's very much possible. It actually makes sense to go that route as melee because if you can't face tank and have to dodge everything your damage uptime hit's rock bottom in most boss fights.

But it's also just as possible to just dodge everything he does or just tank some of his moves, it's up to you really.

That said, your build, while quite good for something selfmade, is quite far on the squishy side. The lowest hp i have on one of my builds is 3.5k and those builds stack mitigations like there is no tomorrow to compensate for it or more like, they ended up having so low life because i've invested so much in mitigation that there aren't any points free for life. You have 1k less and not even half the amount of mitigation they use so it's no surprise you get oneshot by pretty much anything.

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You have 1k less and not even half the amount of mitigation they use so it's no surprise you get oneshot by pretty much anything.

Yeah i saw everywhere that i should have 4-5k hp, the problem is, i had zero problem before fighting shaper, with 80% max resi and 60k armor i tougth my mitigation is pretty solid, becous i only ever died to bulshit mechanism. I was mapping literally just pressing 1 button, nothing hit me, even the guardians do nothing to me, so i had the impression my mitigiation is pretty good. Thats why i got frustrated with shaper. I gues getting some levels helps with my hp, but gaining level at this point is just a torture, 5-6% for a 16 map, where if i die becous im not paying attention i lose 15 minutes of progress (and resource). Is this game really this grindy? And i know i picked the worst class and also melee is harder, i made a pure caster and its 10x esier, but i want to finish with this first (favourite) build, this is an achievment for me. I also know i could farm breachstones for more xp, but then i have to farm currency to buy them:) all game is farm, farm, farm

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Kerberosz wrote:

Is this game really this grindy?

The company literally calls itself "Grinding gear games" and the name is the program, so yes, this game is extremely grindy mostly because it's stuffed beyond limits with RNG gates at every corner.

As far as defenses are concerned, there are 5 damage types each coming in 3 different forms (attacks, spells dots) and all of those require different defenses to deal with and depending on the content you run you might have no trouble with one thing because you have good defenses against it while the next guy hit's your weakpoint and you die. 50k armor is quite good actually, but it only applies to physical hits. On other fronts you are way less protected and 78 ele res is about the bare minimum i'd consider against elemental damage. Just capping it at 75 essentially screams "oneshots please".

And in the case of Shaper balls, they can't really be tanked without spell suppression and/or damage taken as another elements because of his penetration. Even a 90 all res build easily gets blasted because of it. With enough life + guard skill you might just barely survive one of them on a build without those things but tanking is out of the question. And to survive you'd need to reach at least 7k HP in total between life, ES and guardskill.

So yeah, grindy as hell and almost as complex as it's grindy, that's what you sign up for with this game.

Oh man thank you, that answered my question, i guess trying to hard to survive the balls feels pointless, i have armor, i can block alot and press steelsking on slam, maybe i should tank slam and never get out of melee range of the shaper so i dont have to worry about balls. his basic slap doesnt even move my hp. I noticed another fuck up on my part, i forgot that i ticked in steelskin in the calculations, that was an extra layer of confusion on my part that my calculations didnt match reality, now that i disabled it and any other skill like that, i see how much my ele deffens is lacking.

Thanks everyone for all the help. Boots with the instant max charges, flasks, ditching petrified blood. Man i cant believ petrified blood is bad, maybe its for high hp builds? Becouse i think it absorbs like 10% dmg and 40% is a dot, that sounds good. I tought if my hp pool is only 55% and i get 60% of the Full dmg instant thats only 5% difference compared to if i would have 100% hp and getting the 100% dmg, is that 5% really that big of a deal?

You are thinking in terms of 1 hit. Most of the dangerous stuff in this game isn't just a single hit just as most people don't literally get 1-shot, they get hit repeatedly in a short period. Petrified Blood will stack up ALL of that degen from every hit you take.

Additionally, Pinnacle Boss fights like Shaper usually come with a lot of degen on the ground. Petrified Blood is literally no help on these so vs. degen you are just at half life.

Petrified blood prevents you from healing beyond low life with anything but flasks, that means unless you are a Pathfinder or have at least some investment in life flasks, most of the time you'll only have 50% of your total HP pool.

Let's look at the math here:

You take a 4k damage hit after mitigations on a 4200 life build.

With PB you only have 2,1k i.e 50% of that as you can't really recover the other half. You then take the 4k damage to the face. 40% of that is prevented by PB i.e 1600. Of that, 76% is taken as damage over time assuming 20 quality PB so you take 1216 damage over 4 seconds and the remaining 60% of the hit directly hit your 2,1k lifepool that means 2,4k damage to the face. So even disregarding the dot, you are dead.

Without PB you'd be at 4200 life and then take 4k damage being left with 200 life.

Ultimately PBs usefulness defensively depends on your ability to keep your life at max despite PBs recovery restriction. This makes it essentially a Pathfinder oriented skill gem as that's the primary class to do that.

One more thing, if you have 50k armor you want to use Molten Shell instead of Steelskin. That provides a 5k health buff instead of Steelskins 2,2k with longer duration on top.