Invoker Monk/Quarterstaff Skills and Etc 'Mid-Endgame' (t16s) Feedback

Life vs. Energy Shield
At a glance the balance between life vs. energy shield seems right at a baseline. My warrior pushed past 3k life as a strength stacking Titan's Blood as soon as he completed his third ascendancy, while my monk only recently broke 3k energy shield as a CI build. I've been waiting for Rolling Slam's aftershocks to be fixed before I play him again, however, so I'm uncertain how much further that would scale without really juicing up some attribute stacking.

The one thing I might say is that effects which grant flat energy shield, e.g., Blood Mage, might heavily swing that to one side, however. Running ~+200% energy shield on the passive tree gets you an easy 1.5-2k energy shield, inflating the totals heavily. Not sure how to balance that without hurting an already struggling ascendancy, though.

As for amounts, I get destroyed with 3.3k ES + Invoker armor against a +3 difficulty Balbala. Not sure if she's just overtuned, my gear isn't ready for that juice, or its a get gud moment while I was trying to dodge her spam of daggers with my 10% MS.

That being said...

Grim Feast
I love this baby boy, but I know its getting nerfed. Its fantastic for allowing energy shield to have an agressive slam your face into pack after pack play style, but god does the over shield just blow everything else out of the water. Ghost Dance? Trash. Life, unfortunately, doesn't have something quite similar to help deal with swarms of packs. Cannibalism support is closest, and about equivalent for the healing/regeneration, but doesn't quite hit the same level of safety against gang assaults as doubling your EHP if you're clearing packs before they can murk you.

I feel like the best answer is a spirit gem or something for health builds that help them be more survivable while clearing - that gem from PoE 1 that deals a percentage damage from hits taken and dolls it out over time might be the perfect answer (although would be more useful during boss fights where Grim Feast is largely pointless).

As for nerfs, I feel like the one that makes the most logical sense is causing the overshield to degrade back to your normal maximum over a fairly lengthy period, so you're not debating going to clear a pack on the opposite side of the map you skilled to try and go into a boss fight with extra starting HP.

Also, is it possible to add a health globe effect for the overshield value? A few times I didn't realize I was standing in a dot pool because my shield wasn't going down while it was chewing my overshield.

Flicker Strike
Dear god have I loved running this skill. Never got a chance to run a flicker build in PoE 1, but I'm enjoying it immensely. Got some bugs where I occasionally just infinite attack a phantom mob, but other times its fun to hit the flicker on 4 power charges and see which country I end up in (and how it usually drumps me right in front of a critical hit shrine, lol). Fantastic map and breech clear with Charged Staff.

Only request - could we have the power charges consumed one at a time whenever it checks for a repeat? Its unfortunate whenever it drains all my power charges just to do a single attack against a small pack that was out of range of anything. I'm totally not asking so that with my Reaper's Invocation + Profane Ritual feeding it charges mid flicker that the train will just keep going and going and going and going and... (Probably keep the maximum repeats to your max power charges value, lol).

Oh yes, forgot.

Chaos Damage
I feel like sources of chaos damage are probably too high or too prevalent right now. Its great we don't take Act resistance penalties to it, but even when I only had 1.8k energy shield on my monk and wasn't running Grim Feast, I died a lot less often when I took CI and got rid of my ~1k+ health pool.

I running ice monk and they really nailed it.


I run a different build than you do so I hope you are enjoying it cause I am mine. If you want DM me and we can exchange skill trees and stuff :)

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Hyperspacing#5593 wrote:

I running ice monk and they really nailed it.


I run a different build than you do so I hope you are enjoying it cause I am mine. If you want DM me and we can exchange skill trees and stuff :)

Oh I've been enjoying it! Just killed Xekt for the first time this morning, that was an amazing boss fight. Just need to track down those damn citadels lol.

My build's pretty basic, I think I stumbled onto a similar one to the flicker on mobanalytics. Run crit, get my critical hit chance over 50%, put Ambush on Flicker Strike and watch the packs melt from guaranteed crit flicker.

Every build you posted here and said it works in endgame, will now get nerfed into the ground next patch because you mentioned it.


Welcome to GGG.

In timez you'll learn that if something works in endgame, you'd better keep it to yourself.


Enjoy the bricked builds , happy holidays.

"

MAD_DAN#0389 wrote:

Every build you posted here and said it works in endgame, will now get nerfed into the ground next patch because you mentioned it.


Welcome to GGG.

In timez you'll learn that if something works in endgame, you'd better keep it to yourself.


Enjoy the bricked builds , happy holidays.

It always sucks when something you've come to like is nerfed, yes, but Grim Feast honestly is too strong. It feels like a must have for end game mapping, much out of line with other defensive spirit gems like Ghost Dancer or Wind Reader.