Why the hell do I keep dying?

EDIT: wait, you have 1300 effective hp in merciless? That's crazy, no surprise you're dying. You can easily get 2-shot there by crits. Most people stay off merciless lunaris/piety until hitting lvl70 or so and having 3-4k+ effective hp. You really need to get either more hp nodes or go CI instead of picking up so many dmg nodes, and just bump your fireball/firestorm dmg with a 4-5L searing touch, or at least some spelldmg wand+shield and a 5L chest / 4L piece of gear. If you explain what you're trying to achieve with your build, i can clean it up further for you and suggest something more specific than that.

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horse_with_3_mountains wrote:

EDIT: wait, you have 1300 effective hp in merciless? That's crazy, no surprise you're dying. You can easily get 2-shot there by crits. Most people stay off merciless lunaris/piety until hitting lvl70 or so and having 3-4k+ effective hp. You really need to get either more hp nodes or go CI instead of picking up so many dmg nodes, and just bump your fireball/firestorm dmg with a 4-5L searing touch, or at least some spelldmg wand+shield and a 5L chest / 4L piece of gear. If you explain what you're trying to achieve with your build, i can clean it up further for you and suggest something more specific than that.

Thx for the response Horse. Easiest stuff first: don't have a good wand or 5L link because I've struggled getting good gear. Despite being level 61 or something, never even seen a GCP, Exalted, etc, which everyone is using for trades. Due to the aforementioned inability to pick up items when party questing, haven't been able to get good gear.

As for the complicated stuff... what I'm working on is minions for distance between me 'n mobs/defense, and fire witch as offense. Had been spamming skeles because I'd not had a zombie gem. Not knowing any better, most of my focus has been on INT passives, but have tried to focus on fire related ones. Took on a couple STR and DEX passives because the only gear I could get was for non-witches, mostly from solo questing.

Based on encouragement in the thread, changed some of my nodes. Here's the updated version, with much gratitude for the help and patience:



PS: Update on my gear:

Are you hitting lightning thorn mobs? which u get damage return even if u casting from far away

Make a new witch and get zombie gem from first quest.

It has a lot to do with your passive tree, your gear, and your support gem linkage

Your passive tree has a lot of loops and paths directing to the same areas. A lot of wasted points. I want to tell you to respec but at this point you'll be needing a lot of regret orbs.

You have practically no points into minions. So your minions will just get wiped out pretty fast. You invested a ton of points into fire damage and very little into defense so after your minions get wiped your toon would quickly die afterwards.

At this point you should tell the forum what you want your toon to be focusing on.

For instance,

full summoner?
fire nuker with a few tanky minions?

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cloudliu wrote:

Are you hitting lightning thorn mobs? which u get damage return even if u casting from far away

That might be it- happens most in Battlefront, when I'm not near anything. Thought it might be the lightning mages. I do die pretty easily elsewhere though. Have used Grace as an aura, but didn't seem to help much.

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ritualzz wrote:

Make a new witch and get zombie gem from first quest.

Managed to get a zombie via trade just this week. Working on leveling now. Thanks for the idea.

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mattc3303 wrote:

It has a lot to do with your passive tree, your gear, and your support gem linkage...
fire nuker with a few tanky minions?

That. Nuker and tanky minions. Thanks for the help Matt.

Heres my take on the fire nuker/tanky minion build

Passive skill tree build

Your focus is crit chance + crit damage + burning damage

choice of fire skill + burning damage + concentrated + remote mine + fire pen + Ele Pro

when you crit you will ignite the mob which in turn will spread to other mobs through ele pro.

5 zombies for tanking, and skeles

skele - totem - fast cast

zombie - minion health - minion resistance - life leach

4 auras with purity - vitality or determination- clarity - discipline

crit curse/you can also go dual curse and grab flammability.

you'll need a searing touch unique

defensive gear focus will be on HP, Res, Chaos Res

offensive gear crit chance, crit damage, spell damage, elemental dmg, fire damage

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mattc3303 wrote:

Heres my take on the fire nuker/tanky minion build...

Appreciate the time and effort Matt. Am working toward some of those ideas. One question still is, I know people are stacking auras, but they really seem to kill my mana, leaving a lot in reserve. Anything to be done about that? Right now I'm just using Discipline, but have Anger, Purity, maybe one other. Any better ones I should keep an eye out for?