Path of Exile 1 Gameplay Help and Discussion - Path of Physical Damage / Health > Caster / ES - Forum

I just quit my level 80 witch for a marauder because CI is in my opinion inherently flawed. Max life is just too important because of status ailments like shocked, stunned, chilled and frozen. Stuns can be prevented by Eye of Chayula at a sharp damage cost and frozen can be prevented by Dream Fragments at another sharp damage cost, but shocked is dangerous enough to kill you and often chilled can be as well. I used to just skip maps which spawned monsters with high cold damage because that would mean perma-chill through basically the entire map - oh, and those monsters are typically also resistant to cold, have fun clearing an entire map at -30% cast speed and -30% movespeed while everything has ungodly amounts of cold resistance. The CI-keystone should make status ailment calculations based on your max ES (adjust the formula to make the scaling fair), or even better, make the calculations use the sum of your life+ES. Furthermore, my marauder doesn't need to link life leech to his main attack like my witch does. He just uses blood magic gems and thus gets to use 3 percentage-based auras. I was in awe when I started playing a melee, could it really be that you could have more auras, more leech with very minimal investment (and no skill gem linked) and I also don't have to use a curse to make my attacks do damage? Life is good (pun intended). It may be that my build on my witch wasn't ideal (though I did follow a reasonably looking guide from this forum), but I wanted to be a witch because of flavour and the witch-portion of the skill tree doesn't really lend itself to being life-based. I checked the number of witches in the top 100 of the nemesis ladder - care to venture a guess before you read the spoiler? Spoiler It's 1.	Posted by Zeint#1476 on Dec 2, 2013, 5:18:26 AM Quote this Post
Just lost my 79 witch which obviously had next to no armor and relied mostly on granite flasks in a jungle valley map. Died so fast that loggin out wasn't possible (grantite -> full hp via 2 instant flasks -> logout - didn't make it in time, yea) Playing this game w/o armors is a suicide on 73+ or an absolute nightmare on high level maps due to insanely long clear speed due to kiting requirements of particular mobs (hi, act 3 scepter of god leaping pesky #$%$%$@!ers). So the only option is - armor, but if u play armor - you definitely aint playing a witch because who the fuck needs overninethouthand intellect nodes as an armor based user, let alone the amount of skill nodes required to get to most armor nodes Last edited by ZhenyaDM#2163 on Dec 2, 2013, 6:02:45 AM	Posted by ZhenyaDM#2163 on Dec 2, 2013, 5:39:53 AM Quote this Post
" Aelloon wrote: " thinkingofaname wrote: Oh to the guy complaining about cost of good weapons. Similar wands cost just as much if not more, and check out the price of good ES gears while your at it. Really? Maybe you should play the game in a real league before complaining about something like this. Honestly, casters have it so much better in terms of cost for what they're going to run. A Doon Cuebiyari costs like 3 exalteds on Nemesis - you can run a pretty strong strength build on that and the mace would give you good synergy with iron will - end up at like 300%+ increased spell damage. Since you're stacking strength your survivability will be ridiculous too if you make a decent build. Damage will be average - the main strength of it is the survivability. Complaints about mana management: everybody has mana management issues. Melee characters tend to not be near int nodes and tend to lack that - their base mana will be lower, much lower than casters. Mana Leech does not allow you to run multiple % auras without quite a few reservation reduction nodes regardless of your reduced mana level because your pool will be too low. If you want to do that you're going to run a blood magic gem. It is true that a caster would have to socket in life leech too, but their damage output tends to scale less with available links than with melee physical scaling - you need quite a few gems to actually get to these high damage numbers. But most of all you guys seem to be forgetting - the high damage numbers tend to be on SINGLE TARGET abilities and not AoE. And even if they are AoE they tend STILL be melee range. Being able to offscreen a target has HUGE value in certain cases. Also spells can shotgun, something which attacks cannot do - so GMP actually increases damage output if you are close enough to shotgun, on attacks it lowers it (projectile attacks - the few that exist). While multistrike just gives you 2x more attackspeed but you still have to attack 3 times every attack then - which makes it slower than what GMP/LMP has (attack once - 3 hits fly out). EDIT: spells also have scaling through things like righteous fire - they can make very interesting builds happen. Real league? IMAO. Look another HC tard think they are the only one that matters. I heard alt+f4 and perma group hump is really fun to play. And no melee char don't have mana management issues unless you suck. The reason why you can run multiple % is because melee cost per cast is very low, you can reserve 90% of your mana and still have 0 problem with sustain, no reserve node is needed. Try that with casters, you cant even cast a single spell with 10% of your mana. So because casters are closer to int nodes means their skill cost should be higher is the stupidest thing I ever heard. Someone already explained that so I'm not going to wasting my time. Your argument about links is as stupid as your argument about skill cost. Weapon based char will ALWAYS outdamage a caster with <3L links, the only spell that can do on par damage with weapons is EK. And that's non-viable for CI because you have no armor and die to reflect. In fact even EK suck ass until gem lvl 15 or so. I can guarantee you a alch 2h axe with Spectral throw + added fire + faster attack >>>> EK + added fire + fast cast until merc. Wait your can't even run that with EK because you have 0 sustain. Do you even play casters? Doon Cuebiyari? Really? You put your exalt and spells in a 3L weapon with a iron will support? If you think melee have no AoE then I don't know if we are playing the same game. Cyclone, inferno blow, ground slam, Spectral throw, lighting strike....or you know just put Melee splash on just about everything? What did you say, that cost one link? Oh sure that's means you now break even with casters with mana leech. Now you do x2 as much damage and only one link ahead due to the lack of need for life leech gem, my god the horror! IGN Vermillionillusion GMT-4, usually 8-12 pm	Posted by thinkingofaname#4522 on Dec 2, 2013, 11:41:08 AM Quote this Post
Also another thing that cripples casters exspecially early on is that you can't have life/mana leech without a gem-slot while Melee can.	Posted by Emphasy#0545 on Dec 2, 2013, 11:53:43 AM Quote this Post
" Emphasy wrote: Also another thing that cripples casters exspecially early on is that you can't have life/mana leech without a gem-slot while Melee can. the game needs ES on hit as an item affix/prefix	Posted by shroudb#3225 on Dec 2, 2013, 12:08:57 PM Quote this Post
" Aelloon wrote: " thinkingofaname wrote: Oh to the guy complaining about cost of good weapons. Similar wands cost just as much if not more, and check out the price of good ES gears while your at it. Really? Maybe you should play the game in a real league before complaining about something like this. Honestly, casters have it so much better in terms of cost for what they're going to run. A Doon Cuebiyari costs like 3 exalteds on Nemesis - you can run a pretty strong strength build on that and the mace would give you good synergy with iron will - end up at like 300%+ increased spell damage. Since you're stacking strength your survivability will be ridiculous too if you make a decent build. Damage will be average - the main strength of it is the survivability. Complaints about mana management: everybody has mana management issues. Melee characters tend to not be near int nodes and tend to lack that - their base mana will be lower, much lower than casters. Mana Leech does not allow you to run multiple % auras without quite a few reservation reduction nodes regardless of your reduced mana level because your pool will be too low. If you want to do that you're going to run a blood magic gem. It is true that a caster would have to socket in life leech too, but their damage output tends to scale less with available links than with melee physical scaling - you need quite a few gems to actually get to these high damage numbers. But most of all you guys seem to be forgetting - the high damage numbers tend to be on SINGLE TARGET abilities and not AoE. And even if they are AoE they tend STILL be melee range. Being able to offscreen a target has HUGE value in certain cases. Also spells can shotgun, something which attacks cannot do - so GMP actually increases damage output if you are close enough to shotgun, on attacks it lowers it (projectile attacks - the few that exist). While multistrike just gives you 2x more attackspeed but you still have to attack 3 times every attack then - which makes it slower than what GMP/LMP has (attack once - 3 hits fly out). EDIT: spells also have scaling through things like righteous fire - they can make very interesting builds happen. Best post I've seen in a while. But seriously? Doon Cuebiyari? Who dafuq would want to use a 3L weapon with shitty options? Ever heard of Spectral Throw? I think I've seen a million ST ever since 1.0. No spell comes even close to that. But they don't even need that. Just use melee splash with multistrike and facetank ez. Melee have so many options that can be viable on HC. Just check the ladder on Nemesis. How many spellcasters do you see? None. Oh wait... I see 1 in top 100. WOW.	Posted by assajocuna#1341 on Dec 2, 2013, 12:34:46 PM Quote this Post
This is what i think: LL limitation on gear to attack damage is bad. It basicly forces linking spell with LL so you got effective -1 link. For ML ok it can be done since mana pots and mana regen you can get should do. But not life / ES you need life leech and there is no way about it. Gem levels & links - for physical damage you don't care too much about skill gem level. Yea it will give some extra dps but not comparable to spells. If you are spell caster underleveled spell is useless for you. But this got another implication. Skills with 6L are probably twice stronger then 4L, so you want to have your main skill on chest. Works great for attacks but not for casters since chests can't spawn with +skill gem level. Then there is question about resistances for physical and elemental damage on mobs. I do not have data on it so its speculation but looking at presence of "resist elemental damage" vs "Resists physical damage" i would guess physical is favored. Nest is +damage that spawns on most gear slots while +spell damage is only on amulets. Yea you can get +element damage on rings but its power doesn't even compare with added phys/element damage them. Finally passive nodes for spell damage are so few apart What strong points spells have? Doesn't need accuracy - but it's not that good. Unless you want to have 95% hit chance you don't need much accuracy nodes. And there is the never miss - never crit keystone. Status effects. Sadly duration of those is based on damage towards max hp. That means that mob that will get status effect wont be living long eitherway and those are much useless against bosses (prolifeation helps here however)	Posted by Stt3r0#1428 on Dec 2, 2013, 12:52:28 PM Quote this Post
ele resist mobs mobs everywhere.	Posted by ziggro#7495 on Dec 2, 2013, 1:05:52 PM Quote this Post
" assajocuna wrote: Best post I've seen in a while. But seriously? Doon Cuebiyari? Who dafuq would want to use a 3L weapon with shitty options? Ever heard of Spectral Throw? I think I've seen a million ST ever since 1.0. No spell comes even close to that. But they don't even need that. Just use melee splash with multistrike and facetank ez. Melee have so many options that can be viable on HC. Just check the ladder on Nemesis. How many spellcasters do you see? None. Oh wait... I see 1 in top 100. WOW. You do realize that you don't actually have to put your mainspell into a Doon Cuebiyari, right? Like you realize that the level 30 Iron Will just gives you increased cast speed - you can just as easily put it into your 6L chest or similar and socket an iron will in. Of course there are going to be a million spectral throws from patch 1.0.0 onwards - it was the new ability at the start of the new leagues and they finally made 2handers better. The reason it's so ubiquitous in races is that you can use it with a wide variety of weapons and it has range - something which 2h attackers tended to lack. Also how many spellcasters? I look at the ladder first stream I opened (2nd stream that was online - and I knew that Etup is a bow user) - Bob's stream: he is freeze mine + fire trap and has 9872 ES. They're running high maps too. EDIT: opened next stream: Helman - CI discharge @ 6500 ES. Still levelling. " ziggro wrote: ele resist mobs mobs everywhere. This is a problem I agree with. @Aelloon Last edited by Aelloon#5522 on Dec 2, 2013, 1:30:42 PM	Posted by Aelloon#5522 on Dec 2, 2013, 1:24:59 PM Quote this Post
" Aelloon wrote: " assajocuna wrote: Best post I've seen in a while. But seriously? Doon Cuebiyari? Who dafuq would want to use a 3L weapon with shitty options? Ever heard of Spectral Throw? I think I've seen a million ST ever since 1.0. No spell comes even close to that. But they don't even need that. Just use melee splash with multistrike and facetank ez. Melee have so many options that can be viable on HC. Just check the ladder on Nemesis. How many spellcasters do you see? None. Oh wait... I see 1 in top 100. WOW. You do realize that you don't actually have to put your mainspell into a Doon Cuebiyari, right? Like you realize that the level 30 Iron Will just gives you increased cast speed - you can just as easily put it into your 6L chest or similar and socket an iron will in. Of course there are going to be a million spectral throws from patch 1.0.0 onwards - it was the new ability at the start of the new leagues and they finally made 2handers better. The reason it's so ubiquitous in races is that you can use it with a wide variety of weapons and it has range - something which 2h attackers tended to lack. Also how many spellcasters? I look at the ladder first stream I opened (2nd stream that was online - and I knew that Etup is a bow user) - Bob's stream: he is freeze mine + fire trap and has 9872 ES. They're running high maps too. EDIT: opened next stream: Helman - CI discharge @ 6500 ES. Still levelling. Still there's really no point of getting that item for the str bonus. U can have a lot better weapon as spellcaster for it. Also yeah I wasn't checking closely but I'm pretty sure most of the top ladder are non spellcasting users. I see one witch and maybe a few trappers+mf wand culler. Still it's very clear that spellcasters just suck right now compared to melee or any other physical builds. Edit: Oh never mind, Power Siphon is a phsyical build. So yeah only a few trappers and maybe summoner? I haven't seen high ranked summoner but there could be one. Last edited by assajocuna#1341 on Dec 2, 2013, 1:36:13 PM	Posted by assajocuna#1341 on Dec 2, 2013, 1:33:07 PM Quote this Post