Path of Physical Damage / Health > Caster / ES

The gameplay is clearly skewed towards melee. You are expected to have the health pool and armor/evasion of a melee class to take any kind spike damage in this game. This is made worst by making meaningful Energy shield armor the hardest roll in the game. High energy shield with 5L/6L with the correct colors slots? It's only possible if you take a nap and dream about it. Or you made a melee class FIRST, take it to the highest level and pass any useful gear you find to the witch. Any ranged advantage caster is supposedly to have is overshadowed with spectral throw (green gem) and lightning strike (red gem), and most support gems just outright perform better for those skills. To add salt to wound, add multistrike and Life gain on hit augment melee survivability. Caster spell scaling is out of whack compared to melee once you hit merciless. A good 2H weapon drop for melee is an immediate dps boost and they are more common and good caster weapons. Good roll on wands and daggers? Again take a nap and dream.

The caster nightmare would any mob with allies reflect elemental damages, added health, energy shield mobs, lightning thorns, undying, and last if not least REGEN mob where the dps benchmark to take it down is set to....(take a guess).

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Free2Pay wrote:

The gameplay is clearly skewed towards melee.

Yes, I guess that's why everyone in the top 10 in nemesis league is melee.

I wouldn't say Health/Es but clearly Caster <-> Attacker.

There are far less Caster than in closed or open beta and mainly attackers although very often not really melee (ST, Groundslam, LS). Exspecially witches are almost dying out.

I was in denial about this for a while but I'm starting to agree. Spent a ton of currency building an EK witch, and while it's a lot of fun to play, I could have built a duelist that did double the damage for probably a third the cost. I like playing caster but when all the best builds are melee, maybe they could consider having a look at the way spells scale currently.

It is not necessarily the damage part that is lacking. A witch that doesn't hide behind minions and exspecially does not rely on Ghost Reaver to bring back up ES needs to be able to hide somewhere for some time (although not long with a good recovery-cd). There are more and more situations that make this problematic.

Except for some exceptions spells are fine. Arc is still lackluster due to not being AoE or Projectile and thus lacking good supports but maybe after a lot of Melee-Supports there should be some cool new spell-supports. Exspecially since there are no trigger-gems you can trigger with spells except for curse on hit.

the only good spell in the game is discharge, the rest while viable are on a far lower playing field since spell passives are pure garbage.

also melee is much easier to twink and level with, spells are complete shit early game.


there are no dedicated spell caster items in the game. spell casters have to deal with knives and wands having item damage mods or spell mods , for get staffs they are impossible to get good rolls on.

spells primary scaler is crit , so the shadow beats the shit out of the witch. and if you shadow you might as well go spectral throw and crit knives since you can get 8% crit base knives which beat the shit out of every spell and every other item out their except maybe wands.

there arent nearly enough spell damage nodes on the tree , and the elemental nodes are garbage.
and cast rate passives are usually half as good as item passives.


there are no good damage scaling gems for spells (that are exclusive to spells0. basically you got concentrated effect and crit damage , with ek being able to use added fire .


ironically the one spell that breaks the shit out of this is discharge which does not need ANY spell damage , cast rate or even crit nodes to do so much damage that users of it kill them selves with it.


but the real nail in the coffin is what ggg did to curses and act bosses , curses are 70% less effective against bosses , and curses are 50% of a spell casters damage out put.

plus more and more melee builds can make use of siad curses , because of fucking cast on crit which renders dedicated cursing so obsolete that it isnt even funny anymore.

want a crit ice mage? roll a physical dagger shadow and fucking use hatred. DONE!

Well I have decent durability as a witch running a life based build in armor, but where I have 8k armor with my gear+determination, a melee build would probably have double that due to passives. It feels like witches should have higher damage to compensate for lower durability, but instead I'm just "addequite" in both.

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Fun_Hat wrote:

Well I have decent durability as a witch running a life based build in armor, but where I have 8k armor with my gear+determination, a melee build would probably have double that due to passives. It feels like witches should have higher damage to compensate for lower durability, but instead I'm just "addequite" in both.

wrong , the only difference between a melee build and a non melee build is which damage passives you get.


my 2 hand melee scion only has 2k armor at level 79. (all my armor is in granites)
which in hind site i dont think was a good idea, but fuck it ill roll a ranger then.

Well like you said, there are not enough spell damage nodes available, and I feel there should be more. Melee at least had the option to be tanky though with armor passives, where I do not as a witch without going ridiculously far out of my way.

I agree with your above post essentially.

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Fun_Hat wrote:

Well like you said, there are not enough spell damage nodes available, and I feel there should be more. Melee at least had the option to be tanky though with armor passives, where I do not as a witch without going ridiculously far out of my way.

I agree with your above post essentially.

well using a witch as a base case isnt really fair , the witch is terrible. especially for armor the scion would have been a better test case.