Path of Physical Damage / Health > Caster / ES

Blame everyone who complained about "melee" being crap for ages, even well after it was already obviously better/easier than building around than spells.

Please buff me so I can be ever more OP :)

Do all of you casters that claim your character sucks actually have semi decent gear and critical chance? Like...more then 5%? Because thats where your damage comes from critical chance and multiplier + penetration gems. Casters can do the same dps as a melee class at similar cost. Often times depending on the skill involved..less cost. You're not doing it right. Especially if you're making claims that EK is weak. I can see if you're maining something thats ass like Firestorm..but not EK.

Meh... I've been having fun as a freeze pulse CI scion. It's not a godly build, but it's very competent - just finished soloing Poorjoy's Asylum without any problems.

Not sure how it would compare to a melee build with equivalent gear, but I just have no interest in playing melee in this game.

I run Discipline/Purity/Haste/Arctic Armor (lvl 18)/Clarity and have about a 32% crit chance and 2k tooltip DPS (~2.25k after blood rage procs with CWDT).

Combined with dual curses (temp chains / frostbite) + 7300 buffed ES, and the survivability of the build is very high, even though the DPS is pretty mediocre.

It did take a few exalts worth of gear, though...


The build:


Not every build can be OP. Sometimes you just have to be OK with a build that's fun and competent rather than OP.

"

MullaXul wrote:

Do all of you casters that claim your character sucks actually have semi decent gear and critical chance? Like...more then 5%? Because thats where your damage comes from critical chance and multiplier + penetration gems. Casters can do the same dps as a melee class at similar cost. Often times depending on the skill involved..less cost. You're not doing it right. Especially if you're making claims that EK is weak. I can see if you're maining something thats ass like Firestorm..but not EK.

I actually have like 5k dps EK without any crit nodes and my clearing speed when compared to my ST char(with 450dps weapon) feels way better. And my EK build with MoM and EB is extremely tanky aswell.

Also if you take a look at the top 20 of Nemesis ladder, I think most of them are ranged, Helmann might be the only exception. I don't really consider ST "melee".

Another issue is that going pure energy shield while is far weaker than you would think.

Sure you can get more energy shield easier than life. But your physical defense is heavily neutered. To make matters worse, you are far more susceptible to dangerous status effects like freeze/chill, shock because their duration is based on damage compared to your HP not Es, and even stun (the innate 50% stun avoidance does not help much when almost all damage you take could stun you because of your tiny life pool)
Sure you can buy unique items to remove your worries from those status effect but not everyone can afford them and you give up valuable equipment slots to wear typically weaker items.

Then ES users have no flasks to help shield recharge. GGG acts like the fast shield regeneration would make up for it. Except 6 seconds and even 3 seconds (if you want to spend too much precious passive points into es recovery delay) is FOREVER in an ARPG. You are forced to travel all over the nodes to get ZO/GO ESPECIALLY as a witch to have some sort of active combat regen. Seriously why can't you give us a flask that starts energy shield regen at like 1/4 and below rate but keep the delay when the flask ends?

And then even with all the energy shield drawback you let chaos damage bypass shield for no good reason at all. If you don't want that to happen you have to give up all your health for CI or have to get the expensive as hell Shavronne's Wrapping that hardly anyone could get.

"

Randomzx wrote:

Another issue is that going pure energy shield while is far weaker than you would think.

I'm not sure that the issue is that it's super weak. I think the issue is that there is only one possible way to make it viable:
Chaos Innoculation OR Shavronne's Wrappings
Ghost Reaver
Decent ES gear

And one of either
-Discipline aura + aura buffs, some ES nodes
-Lots and lots and lots of ES nodes

Plus some form of damage mitigation (Molten Shell / Arctic Armor / etc)


Doesn't help things that a good ES roll is a more expensive stat on gear than armor/evasion.

"

ebrl wrote:

Blame everyone who complained about "melee" being crap for ages, even well after it was already obviously better/easier than building around than spells.

It's more a problem of spell casters being overnerfed than melee being overbuffed in my opinion. Nerf on Freezing Pulse and Ethereal Knives, nerf of curses on bosses, nerf on Rightous Fire...
Rightous fire surely could afford the nerf but others? Not sure it was a necessity. And the biggest offender Discharge is still running wild.

Also critical build damages are overwhelming at the moment, it's kinda getting out of hand. Building a spellcaster without crits feels like crippling oneself. The increased critical damages gem is a serious culprit here, once you get a 20/20 one you don't even really need any other source of crit multipliers. For only one slot the potential damage increase is spectacular, far higher than any other support.

Casters (except summoners) get screwed over in almost every possible way.

Most offensive spells suck: low damage, low projectile speed, low area effect, delayed or with substantial drawbacks or otherwise unreliable. I think many spells need to be buffed in one or multiple areas. Seriously, why do so many spells suck?

Casters rely on curses more than anyone else, but there exists curse immunity, and in a party there's competition for the curse slot(s) on monsters. I think curse immunity should be changed to curse resistance, and non-casters should not have access to curses as easily as they do now (perhaps by changing the gems to all require substantial amounts of int, and by nerfing items that allow an extra curse effect). We could use more passives that enhance curses as well.

Physical/melee has a much easier time to get good equipment because wands, daggers and staves can get both physical and spell damage mods.

Casters don't benefit from Wrath/Hatred/Anger and miss out the substantial increase in damage that weapon-based attackers get. A Casters relying on ES doesn't benefit from Determination because it's a percentage armor increase, but non-casters benefit from Discipline because it's a flat increase in ES.

CI casters can't do blood magic maps at all.

Pure energy shield is weak. Casters need some form of reliable damage reduction against physical attacks that doesn't drain insane amounts of mana like Arctic Armour.

Call me crazy but D3 and especially Torchlight did this right..

Just add (not completely replace) weapon DPS (at least partially) into spell damage..and we can have proper spell damage scaling ..

of course..we will bump into another problem..it's passive tree design and affixes..min-maxers will quickly realize if taking spell damage passives or weapon damage passives are better for casters..maybe it's time to start merging some stats? or at least normalizing?