2h Pure Physical Heavy Strike Slayer - build review (state of melee)

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robmafia a écrit :

lolz @ hilarious criticism of brass dome

lolz @ asking me to explain something simple while reporting every post (and on a day when the moderation was... silly. my god, the mundane/objective things that were edited... lolz @ that, too)

@ charan - heavy is the head that wears the crown

I haven't reported any posts if that was directed at me.

You're still 100% wrong about pretty much everything you've said in this thread, but at the very least I don't think you've broken the terms at all. Not on the last few pages of this thread anyways.

And judging from the posts of mine that were also removed it really seems like someone just went through and indiscriminately deleted random paragraphs. Half the stuff deleted was just random comments about melee builds, I can't even imagine how it's possibly outside the terms of service.

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Legatus1982 a écrit :

I haven't reported any posts if that was directed at me.

You're sill 100% wrong about pretty much everything you've said in this thread,

oh, come on...

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Legatus1982 a écrit :

but at the very least I don't think you've broken the terms at all. Not on the last few pages of this thread anyways.

And judging from the posts of mine that were also removed it really seems like someone just went through and indiscriminately deleted random paragraphs. Half the stuff deleted was just random comments about melee builds, I can't even imagine how it's possibly outside the terms of service.

i don't like that we can agree 100% on this, though.

i've seen a lot of dumb/silly/petty/wtf moderation on here (ie: my sig), but yesterday's censorships were just... yeah, no idea. nothing was remotely near even BORDERLINE violating.

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etkratos a écrit :

Here to defend brass dome lol.

In delve i did some carries. On some really nasty encounters brass dome was easily the best option to ensure no spike dmg would kill me.

Yeah, it's kinda nuts to me how people don't see how powerful it can be.


To anyone wondering why Brass Dome can be so powerful, just consider how much extra damage crits do. Monsters have a base crit multi of 130%, so on a crit they'll deal 30% extra damage or roughly 3/4ths of getting an extra support if we're comparing our own skills.

Granted, monsters start out at 5% crit so on average that 5% crit with 130% multi is only 1.5% extra average damage, but keep in mind it's still a burst and if it's doing 5k final damage normally then a crit will deal at least 6,500 damage. Even that comparatively "small" burst can kill someone if they're mostly okay with regular hits.

But let's do some quick math:

Worst case for Brass Dome is it takes a 130% crit and turns it into a 100% crit. 30 is about 23% of 130, so you're looking at 23% mitigation against the worst spike damage. That's better than Fortify. And it only gets better as enemy crit multi goes up.

Low tier map crit is +30-35% crit multi, so 160% to 165%. At 160%, cutting off the extra 60% means mitigating 37.5% of the whole hit. At 165% the cut off 65% is 39.39% mitigation.

High tier maps have 41-45% extra crit multi resulting in 171-175% crits. Lob the tops off those and you're mitigating 41.53% to 42.86% of the scariest hits you can possibly take.

Granted, this isn't quite exclusive to just Brass Dome since other items like Belt of the Deceiver also mitigate crits, but against heavy crit stuff it is the single biggest source of mitigation one can have especially when one factors in monsters that have been admitted to always crit (such as Core Malachai did on his tentacle attack). Even just using the belt plus Indomitable (thus 50% crit mitigation) results in lowering the worst 175% bursts down to 125%, for a reduction of roughly 28.5%.

Keep in mind an 80% Loreweave is only 20% mitigation over having 75% resists. It does work against all elemental though.

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sidtherat a écrit :

the main reason of this thread was to reconcile MYSELF with MY assessment of what melee is nowadays.

That sounds like something that's best kept to a discussion with yourself, rather than a public post on, y'know, a forum. I mean...

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The Dictionary a écrit :

Forum
n. "a place, meeting, or medium where ideas and views on a particular issue can be exchanged."

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sidtherat a écrit :

avoiding cheats like MS nebuloh or whatever.

So... Intentionally avoiding GOOD builds? So you're cherry-picking, taking "intentionally gimped melee" vs. "the good ranged builds?"

You're not comparing apples to apples: you're straw-manning, basically. If you wanted to be fair, you'd have to compare your build to something also largely unused ranged-wise, like taking Nuro's Harp (the highest-level unique bow) for, I dunno, Burning Arrow? (again, an ancient target-locking skill thrown at new players in The Twilight Strand, just like Heavy Strike)

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sidtherat a écrit :

you know what is the most important part of the result? that - as expected - there is NOTHING good about playing melee in 2019. ive been tankier with a wander or bowmen while definitely having more speed and damage output.

Translation: "I rigged the whole thing to satisfy my confirmation bias."

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sidtherat a écrit :

the 'generic' way of building melee character IS a noob trap - it costs more yet gives you less. in convenience, in clear speed, in accessible content.

Yes, because nothing screams "generic" like some rather obscure and rarely-used pieces of gear.

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sidtherat a écrit :

%Armour. imho STACKING it is a trap. flask gives you +100% if rolled well. you put it on stibnite and with one flask press (that you can press a lot thanks to it being cheap on charges) you get 50% evasion chance AND you double your armour. it is worth ~6 average AR passives if not more.

few accidental AR pieces (like 250 boots, 700 helmet and 1500 chest) + 100% + 3000 from Lion's Roar is perfectly enough to handle everything other than 5000+ hits in the endgame THAT YOU CAN AVOID! IIRC armour will never reduce more than 1/10th of its raw value. you can ofc get 50k AR (with a HEAVY investment or with Jugg+BrassDome and moderate investment) but that is going to cost you A LOT in passives

enter the AR 2.0: flat phys reduction, 'phys taken as ele' and Loreweave. 5 end charges: 20%, flat. then you get Taste of Hate, yet another ~20% (less but with Loreweave it is close in reality), Basalt - yet another 20%. then you have all the ascendancy bonuses granting less damage taken
and the best part: this method works vs DoTs. Armour doesnt.

Apparently you're still stuck back in 2.6? I guess you're about to tell us we'd all best go CI+GR+VP so we have 15k ES with no investment and never die?

'cuz Basalt flasks were nerfed to 15% a year and a half ago. They were nerfed well before your Craicean's Carapace even came to be.

Also, the truth is that the "piecemeal physical mitigation" is about the same as it was even pre-2.0, where people claimed that just running a Lightning Coil (even post-nerf!) was just fine, when it amounted to... 22.5% (or 30%) reduced damage from physical hits.

Unless you're converting ALL your physical damage to elemental (as per an immortal build, but those I believe are now impossible outside of Standard) your "tertiary defense" plan only reduces, at most, around half of incoming physical damage... Which means your effective HP isn't even doubled.

Defenses that you measure on the basis of % reduced get exponentially more valuable the more you stack: 50% reduced damage = 100% more eHP, but 75% reduced damage = 300% more eHP.

So if you have 3 endurance charges, a basalt, Taste of Hate, and fortify, (since your BV or whatever just WBs through enemies to proc that, as dumb as it is) you get... 50.08% of reduced incoming physical damage from hits.

And no, this isn't a free investment: you still gotta produce those endurance charges, after all. And with that many flasks you may start eating into your DPS-boosting ones. (ToH does double duty, but we're neglecting Wise Oak, Dying Sun, Sin's Rebirth, Soul Catcher/Ripper, maybe even Vinktar...) And of your response to endurance charges is "Well, stop and use Enduring Cry," that's eating a load into your clear speed, since if you're using it, that means there's monsters nearby you're not busy killing.

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sidtherat a écrit :

about other passives in mara/duelist: you say 14 passives. and how many travel nodes? how many missed opportunities to take something else? mara/duelist has terribad pathing, nothing there is worth even thinking about it..

You act like the typical meta build these days ISN'T chiefly travel nodes. The introduction of jewel sockets (and ESPECIALLY abyssal Jewels) changed all this: most good trees now look like what we'd have called "bad" trees pre-2.0, and vice-versa. This means that travel is irrelevant: we're going to be traveling and cover multiple sectors anyway, since our main objective is getting those jewel sockets... And every outside class has an equal number of them. So after that, we just pick based on what else we're cherry-picking while we're at it.

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sidtherat a écrit :

here are 2000 HC Betrayal juggs: https://poe.ninja/challengehc/builds?class=Juggernaut&heatmap you can see what works nowadays. i urge anyone to explore heatmaps. it is DEPRESSING to see how little of value GGG managed to put in bottom-left part of the tree while constantly pimping up templar (fetish or something?) and other caster/elemental parts

But, anyone can see that there's huge cold spots on ANY class's heatmap: you act like it's just something special in the Marauder/Duelist area. It's like you purposely ignored what I had to say about bad nodes up in the Witch (Prism Weave? SERIOUSLY?) and other sections of the tree.

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鬼殺し a écrit :

I am willing to take a little stab here, to try to hit the crux of the matter with a mixture of experience and luck, and say the problem is simply this: in the pursuit of maximising character build possibility, GGG forgot or perhaps even willingly ignored some very basic, very crucial rules of fantasy combat. They flagrantly scorn the equilibrium between sustainable, close-quarters melee attacks and ammunition-or-mana limited ranged attacks, between damage types, and between potency of attack and appropriate cost. In doing all this, they allowed the game to all but change genres from ARPG to Gauntlet-style shoot-em-up.

Granted, most ARPGs tend to not have "ammunition" requirements that actually matter much for bow-users; when they do have arrow counts, this numbers in the hundreds carried at a single time.

Rather, balance is still handled through other factors, such as a lack of AoE, or having lower damage.

While not QUITE the same genre, one popular game that comes to mind is Terraria: it's noted for having a huge, diverse selection of offensive options, between melee, ranged, spell, summon, etc. And there, range still has some obvious advantages, but this is countered by a few things melee has... Perhaps most prominently, non-melee attacks have a hard limit on how many enemies they can hit at once; typically "piercing" stuff there (spells and arrows alike) are limited to 1-5 pierces; and ranged AoEs, when they exist at all, have a similarly finite hit count. (in a side-scrolling game where you CAN'T one-shot packs, this is a much more important factor than it is in PoE) This can be pretty huge compared to melee, which always hits all enemies in the attack's up-close AoE.

The end result for that game is clear: melee can achieve VASTLY higher "pack DPS" to make up for the lack of safety. That's a huge difference with PoE, where we have all manner of ranged AoEs that can obliterate whole magic+rare packs in a single shot, rather than resorting to plinking individual targets as the tradeoff for safety.

I think there's a microcosm for this, actually: the static strike rework. Pre-rework, it hit EVERYTHING within range, meaning your "pack DPS" (e.g, total damage output counting every target) was limited only by how many enemies you could fit in its (decently sizeable) AoE. But post-rework, it can only hit one enemy at a time, potentially scalable with chaining? Basically, with ranged/magic working how melee should, they made one melee skill that worked correctly and made it work like how a ranged skill should... (see also a "correct" ranged skill that got power-creeped to uselessness: Lightning Arrow. It didn't give an AoE burst on hit, but just arced to a SINGLE target)

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鬼殺し a écrit :

GGG were rank ARPG design amateurs when they started to make PoE. Where anyone else would have learned from their mistakes and done better next time, they opted not to have a next time. By committing to PoE as 'their one game', they have doubled down time and again on those mistakes with every iteration of PoE. Each time they do so, they dig themselves even deeper into this hole started so long ago.

This really is also part of it: GGG's own lack of humility is hurting the game. It's kinda also with how they deal with player suggestions: they DO listen and DO occasionally take their ideas (waaay too many changes were so oddly specific in matching what I'd recommended to have any other explanation) but act like they'll be damned if they'd ever admit specific cases.

This carries to how they view their own work; it's kinda exemplified by Chris' infamous "experts with thousands of hours of experience" line; GGG's mantra is that they are perfect and therefore never make mistakes... Which means that their actual mistakes (which everyone makes) hence never get directly corrected: later correction only occurs inadvertently, if their decision for something "new" over-writes and old mistake of theirs.

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鬼殺し a écrit :

anything that can clear a room with one cast *should not be spammable even in an ARPG*.

Yeah, it's as if, in another era long past, GGG took offense when someone discovered a build that could clear an entire map in a single cast, and proceeded to nerf it into the ground with ever-so-much collateral damage: they ruined an entire CLASS for two years, as well as destroying an entire mechanical side of the game. Chaos damage went from "something rare and special: you could decide your lightning or fire damage dealt with HIGH investment," to "freely available as these spells alone!"

@ACGFIT

if you dare to tell me keep my FEEDBACK to myself ill reply in kind and tell you to bring your PERSONAL issue with me in a form of PRIVATE message

are we done with this childish stuff yet?


ad rem then:

your entire point is that there is THE build and anything else is unoptimal and as such thrash and should not be spoken about. cool. it is kind of a point of view that i happen to 100% disagree

why? because if i follow your line of thought and replace items you deem 'not perfect' with perfect ones ill end up with the same f.. generic MS character every other kid in town already built

current state of selfcast is nicely described as:
- you can make any spell better by linking it with Trap Support
- and then replacing said spell with Arc

you want me to do this to my build. build that you havent yet named a single WRONG (just unoptimal and i hope you see the difference)


as for the armour.. well. theoretical speech here. practice shows that AR stacking is worthless waste of resources because there are alternatives that do the same WHEN IT MATTERS

1k AR is very nice, and any character should have it. 3k you get from one flask. Stibnite of Iron Skin is most probably THE strongest defensive flask in the game btw. oh and i would like to meet someone who does not use chemist with his basalt NOR uses warlord's mark as a caster (most casters have better uptime on Endurance Charges than melee players..), then there is a Chaos Golem (and nice cheap enchant for 150% effect)

i have few chars with 20k+ AR and in ALL cases i know ive overdone it as i do not need any protection from sub-boss mobs and boss mobs big phys slams are a) avoidable b) absurd

crit reduction/crit removal is great, but that is not AR but Brass Dome. that chest would be just as good with 500AR

you can ofc use AR and stack it to 40k+ but - just like you did to me - ill simply say it is unoptimal choice and thus everything youve said is void. makes sense?


other than that - even if you replace my chest armour with anything else the build remains hot garbage and the chest itself is a hot garbage. so why it bothers you so much?

The way I see it, one of the most important consequences of this particular character development model that PoE uses is the reversed thought process when building a character. In other games you usually go 'I want to play class X', then you pick a main skill (or several), with the item scope and availability of defenses usually decided or narrowed down by the choice of class.
In PoE you pick a skill, then you pick the ascendancy and item set according to their advantages and disadvantages.

So, which part of this process would actually decide you're going melee? In other games it's usually the choice of class, which would usually provide you with bonuses that would make the endeavor worthwhile, be it exceedingly high dps, mobility or durability. That's because other games recognize that fighting at close range is a disadvantage.

In PoE, it's the choice of skill that decides it, and there's only so much a skill can grant which would tempt you into accepting the disadvantage of close combat. It's usually exceedingly high damage output in the case of skills like molten strike, mobility advantage in the case of cyclone, or, in the case of blade vortex and RF, both (yes, I'm including BV and RF in close combat skills, the attack-spell choice is secondary in PoE).

Ultimately, the problem here is that PoE does a piss poor job of connecting skills with elements you use to construct an rpg archetype, because the game doesn't really provide one for you. You can see that lack of connection clearly if you don't get too hung up on the details of Sid's experiment.

Of course, there are also a ton of problems with those elements too, like the discrepancy between the cost of a strong attacker weapon versus the cost of L21 gem + caster weapon in some cases, but talking about that is a waste of time when the core system is this flawed.

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ACGIFT a écrit :

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sidtherat a écrit :

avoiding cheats like MS nebuloh or whatever.

So... Intentionally avoiding GOOD builds? So you're cherry-picking, taking "intentionally gimped melee" vs. "the good ranged builds?"

yo, Molten strike is not melee, it look like it, it use weapon but it is not melee.

It scale on projectiles and most of MS builds use point blank.
IF MS is melee then blade vortex or EK could be called melee.

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鬼殺し a écrit :

I did not mean to imply they had a lack of humility or an excess of arrogance, only that the inertia with this game is very difficult to resist. It seemed to go from a wee baby Closed Beta to a massive Open Beta in no time, and then the hype (and GGG's impressive ability to deliver on that hype) took over. I maintain that PoE, and thus GGG, never really went through much in the way of a natural growing process. Shit got big fast, and once that boulder's rolling down the hill, it ain't gonna stop. I am fairly sure there's been no point in the past 5 years where GGG could stop to catch their breath long enough to really think about that boulder's trajectory or velocity. This is why I call them amateurs; not because they're useless or full of themselves, but because everything they've learned, they've learned on one project.

Well, at the risk of sounding like a douche, last time I looked they did have a balance team and I AM calling them useless/amateurs in the context of balancing OLDER content.

This isn't a personal attack directed at specific individuals or lashing out at the company, it's just an observable fact. You have people on the company who's job it is to deal with balance issues, and they aren't doing that job - not for older content at least. Maybe this is by direction of the upper staff (that they focus only on new content and not worry about balancing stuff from years ago, or following a specific procedure that isn't working) but whatever the case is, a "balance team" should be balancing the game - all of it, not just the new stuff. They are failing to do that job.

Even a "I don't have time to deal with this shit" approach would still lead to you looking at the charts, seeing "dual strike is 98% less effective compared to vortex builds" and buffing dual strike by 98% damage, as a rudimentary no-brains, no-effort baseline for balancing. But they aren't even doing that much.

It's not an opinion, it's a provable fact given some value "x" of xp/hour (assuming currency generation is linear with xp generation) for any given skill, some other value "y" of deaths/hour doing that content, and some other value "z" of deviation from that skill's ability to keep up with other, "better/good" skills in terms of both x and y. MANY of the game's abilities will fail this test, and I don't mean by a little bit. I feel that GGG most likely has this information widely available internally and as such I feel they don't have an excuse for the existing state.

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Head_Less a écrit :

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ACGIFT a écrit :

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sidtherat a écrit :

avoiding cheats like MS nebuloh or whatever.

So... Intentionally avoiding GOOD builds? So you're cherry-picking, taking "intentionally gimped melee" vs. "the good ranged builds?"

yo, Molten strike is not melee, it look like it, it use weapon but it is not melee.

It scale on projectiles and most of MS builds use point blank.
IF MS is melee then blade vortex or EK could be called melee.

Something people keep messing up now is the difference between melee damage and melee range.

Tectonic Slam is melee damage but not melee range. Blade Vortex is melee range but not melee damage.

What's more meaningful to talk about? Melee range. The type of damage a skill has doesn't mean a damn thing anymore beyond figuring out how to scale it. The range of a skill is very meaningful because how the skill plays is based on that.

But of course a skill's range isn't everything. BV plays far better than Heavy Strike after all. Why? Because casting BV even once means it can do damage at least 8 times over its duration, it can be cast before even seeing an enemy, and when you do get in range and have it up it'll deal damage automatically. Heavy Strike requires getting in close, aiming at the enemy, and then pressing a button each time you want to deal damage.

In the context of talking about actual game mechanics, MS and BV are indeed melee and they're some of the best skills for that too.