Assessing the Bandit quest: Post your last 4 skill points

So, here's the story.

I've been building a glasscannon type build (Burning Arrow Crit Ranger to be precise), and in my assumption that maximizing DPS while getting bare minimum survivability would be the way to go, I invested in the +4 passive points from the Bandit quest reward. 45 health, 30 mana, or 8 resist doesn't increase my DPS, after all.

But now my build is done. And I mean DONE. Ready. Finished. I got every single node of crit chance in the vicinity, I got the elemental damage I can reach, I got the 12%+ health nodes and I got Iron Reflexes. If I happen to get a level-up or two in the near future, I have no idea where to put them, except for the 6% health nodes nearby.

And then I realized that that 6% health is less than the 45 HP bonus from the Bandit quest. If I'm going to be spending the few extra points I can gather on nothing but survivability, I'm actually getting sub-optimal results, because I would have ended up with more HP but the same damage if I'd picked the total 180 bonus HP as a reward. Huh.

Now, it may just be that my specific build simply didn't end up close enough to any other useful orbs and everyone else's build has plenty room for juicy passives. And that's why I'm making this thread, as a bit of a polling to see whether that +1 passive point really is more useful than 45 health.

Therefore! Post me the sum of the LAST 4 Passive skills you learned, and tell me whether that was better or worse than +180 health (or +120 mana or +32 resistance, I don't discriminate :3)

Yes I've had the same reflexion. It depends of the build.

I usually pick the Health reward at least on Merciless, trying to play *softcore* here which IMO makes it the best difficulty to go for it.
Weighting passive nodes vs gear mods should help you make a decision what's it worth, as well.

Once your build is 'done', you have attained a certain level, but chances are that you would be willing to get yet another level if you could trade the skill point you got for that level for one of the bonuses from the bandits.

Truth to be told, I regularly take the skill point bonus, (because I have thing for skill points) but in the back of my mind I know I am not making the right choice. ;)

Essentially, it is simply a problem of get one cookie now, or get two cookies later, as most of the time you will not regret your choice until your skill points no longer give good returns upon level-up.

For open beta I will definitely stick to the health bonus for most my characters.
I might even consider the mana bonus if it fits a build, but the resistance bonus becomes less impressive as you attain higher levels. You will end up with resistance mods on your gear anyway.



As for the last 4 points in a build, it doesn't even need to be the last 4. Especially considering the respec options in PoE, I suggest just listing the 4 most worthless passive points in you current build.

I am done pretty quickly, I suppose, because my characters always tend to have a few spare passive points that I don't spend unless I can get to a bonus that is actually useful. When my build is 'done', I usually don't have any nearby nodes that are useful, or I would have included them in the plan for my build.

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0nin wrote:

Therefore! Post me the sum of the LAST 4 Passive skills you learned, and tell me whether that was better or worse than +180 health (or +120 mana or +32 resistance, I don't discriminate :3)

Post your build, I'll show you where to put them.

The 6% health bonus breaks even with +45hp when you have 750hp. Once you break the 750hp barrier then the 6% hp bonus outweighs the static 45hp reward.

Short term the +45hp is worth it. Long term I would pick the %hp increase everytime.

This all depends on build of course.

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Tarmalen wrote:

The 6% health bonus breaks even with +45hp when you have 750hp. Once you break the 750hp barrier then the 6% hp bonus outweighs the static 45hp reward.

Short term the +45hp is worth it. Long term I would pick the %hp increase everytime.

Point to remember, though: that 45 health does get multiplied by your 6-8% health bonuses same as any other source of health (and the same goes for the mana reward). So the break-even point is 750 base health, which is significantly harder to get to.

To be honest, I always choose the +8% all res with my marauder. If you see the skill tree, there's rarely any node that gives more than +6% to all resistances, so to me having that perm resist bonus is a great relief.

Then I KNOW I don't need to rely on egar to stack my resistances, so all my gear is now focused in +life +damage +defense +life regen +quantity +rarity +any other interesting mods besides resistances.

It's great to don't have to worry about having to rely on your gear to stack up resistances, and the hp can come easily and in bigger numbers from items, yet I've never seen any item that gives 10%+ to ALL resistacnes but single ones.

But all in all, depends on your build :)

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Skivverus wrote:

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Tarmalen wrote:

The 6% health bonus breaks even with +45hp when you have 750hp. Once you break the 750hp barrier then the 6% hp bonus outweighs the static 45hp reward.

Short term the +45hp is worth it. Long term I would pick the %hp increase everytime.

Point to remember, though: that 45 health does get multiplied by your 6-8% health bonuses same as any other source of health (and the same goes for the mana reward). So the break-even point is 750 base health, which is significantly harder to get to.

^ This. lrn2mechanics

I'd pick skill point every time, for a reason few people have addressed.

Builds can be respec'd. It's not hard, but in a hypothetical open beta future in which we put actual time into our character until they get to very, very high levels (I'm talking 80 and above) I think farming for Regrets will start to feel like a more sensible alternative than getting another character to that point.

When this happens, it's possible that our new target build desperately needs those 4 skill points. Even worse, what we picked might turn out to be completely useless (HP for a CI build, Mana for a BM build... you get the point).

Passive points are refundable. HP, MP and res rewards are not. I'd keep this in mind if I wanted to get that character to a high level.

If the character is created with a specific level for a specific purpose, like a PvP league, then yes, I'd pick the best choice for the build. But other than that, passive points all the time.