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

"

sidtherat a écrit :

trouble is - why you claim these decisions are bad?

they fit the genre archetype. this build does everything proper. what it doesnt do is use 'meta' choices that FOR NOT F.. REASON are like 10 times better.

POE doesnt have a manual but in the proverbial one: where does it say 'armour is useless, do not use it'? where does it say 'some skills are GARBAGE, never touch them, EVER'? list is long.

not a single part of this build is WRONG in logical sense. all what is wrong about it is that it follows well beaten arpg path of 'melee'.

meanwhile in POE melee means 'cyclone CoC' or 'cyclone Herald of Agony'. (and instead of fixing it on the hour they buff spells for like 4th time in a row.. WTF?)

challenge is voluntary, optional and noone is forced to even look at it.
i just wanted to know how far you can get THIS BUILD (that, again, is perfectly fine game mechanics wise. the game balance and design is what is broken).

...yeah, armour's actually pretty strong.

and lolz @ backpedaling to making this solely about this all to specific and bad build.

pob link

Next you will do Flame Surge to judge the current state of spells?

:D

Op thread is about>new player building a pure phy damage + 2h + non jugg + melee + rt

Armor is strong only when using a jugg or block and it is generally bad vs elemental damage, what op said is true.

The state of 2h phy melee is dogshit.

"

ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate a écrit :

So your argument is that you deliberately made bad choices and ended up with a bad build? You get that your logic is absolutely insane, right?

Yea sure however try to think a minute and realize a game is failing when only meta builds or very specific builds using specific items/skills are worth playing.

Guys, Sid's point is that these shouldn't be bad decisions in the first place. And that the game suffers from the fact that there are so many perfectly rational yet trash choices, and so few well-worn paths everyone follows because they're blatantly superior.

We don't even need to go as far as a build like this - I'd say look at options like hybrid defenses (es/armour on a non-Guardian; es/ev on a non-Trickster), 2h melee (staves in particular), pure phys non-crit, any single-target melee skill, etc. Someone help me with other examples.

Berserker lol. We could even get into some of the shitty uniques out there with high level requirement but no purpose.

These are all choices presented as worthwhile when properly invested in, but they're just not.

This is a balance discussion. This is also a discussion about GGG's incompetence - because I think the status quo is accidental as well as being a result of short-term planning designed to boost league numbers by dangling power creep.

PoE is more fun when there are more powerful choices that each need to be built around differently. While there's no such thing as perfect balance and some builds will always stand out, general playstyle choices should only be "bad" if you don't know wtf you're doing (combining brutality with elemental damage or something).

"

sidtherat a écrit :

trouble is - why you claim these decisions are bad?

they fit the genre archetype. this build does everything proper. what it doesnt do is use 'meta' choices that FOR NOT F.. REASON are like 10 times better.

POE doesnt have a manual but in the proverbial one: where does it say 'armour is useless, do not use it'? where does it say 'some skills are GARBAGE, never touch them, EVER'? list is long.

not a single part of this build is WRONG in logical sense. all what is wrong about it is that it follows well beaten arpg path of 'melee'.

meanwhile in POE melee means 'cyclone CoC' or 'cyclone Herald of Agony'. (and instead of fixing it on the hour they buff spells for like 4th time in a row.. WTF?)

challenge is voluntary, optional and noone is forced to even look at it.
i just wanted to know how far you can get THIS BUILD (that, again, is perfectly fine game mechanics wise. the game balance and design is what is broken).

I'm not even talking about major meta decisions here, this build is just BAD, plain and simple, so it's not a fair basis for comparison. I didn't even take the time to optimize, because this is such total trash it would take me hours, but here's what I did in about 3 minutes:



That's all I changed, took less time to do than it took me to type this, and your build now has about 600 more life, more leech and sustain, about 30% more shaper DPS, and the gear on it costs LESS. None of these were difficult decisions requiring super advanced metagame knowledge to play. I didn't change your skills or supports around (other than to swap out AC for multistrike in both versions, because I'm assuming that's what you do for bosses). And I'm sure it could get much, much better than this.

So... yeah. What I said earlier: you're just straw-manning with this thread, and you're hurting those of us trying to make intelligent arguments in favor of "single target melee skills really need help."

Please stop.

Sid does a pretty good job of illustrating one important point: PoE's "meta" is WILDLY different from what'd be expected of an ARPG, and not something obvious or intuitive to a new player.

And yeah, 2H melee is in a REALLY bad spot; I can attest to this, having futzed around with a number of builds. They were last viable back when the game was roughly balanced around having 100-300k DPS pre-3.0. Now we exist with Incursions (and to a lesser extend, delves) where the "par" point is to press close to 1M DPS.

Armour can be nice, and does handle a LOT of situations to make them trivial, EXCEPT... Weirdly enough, it makes "enemies deal xx% of extra damage as ___" mods as much a no-go as elemental reflect is to most builds. Melee+armour is balanced pretty fine around it NOT being there, but those mods are balanced assuming you're based around evasion or a huge pool of ES, whereupon "100% extra damage as fire" is simply "they deal 25% more damage." If you're capped on PDR (as any armour build is) this suddenly becomes "they deal 250% more damage."

Normally this is not a big deal for ranged builds, but in melee? Well, the expectation with melee is that you'll get subjected to a LOT more attacks than someone running Loreweave would, and hence this becomes pretty deadly. I have a build that can facetank Minotaur with a lot of mods (increased damage, less armour, vulnerability, all at the same time without flasking? Sure thing!) but the "gain extra damage as an element" mod means ordinary mob packs can shred him.

I do have a bit of nitpicking on establishing the meta for chestpieces; Loreweave is the most popular, but hardly the only "meta" choice. It accounts for less than 23.7% of total chests, and there's a relatively decent number of characters using rare (15.5%) Kaom's (11.6%) Inpulsa's (9.8%) and even Shavs. (8.3%) It works out to at least 14 different options that all see at least 1% usage. (Craicean's Carapace is waaaay down at only 0.2%)

Also, the build MIGHT just be plain bad (not sure why Sid used a Disfavour instead of Starforge!) but I guess I can't tell entirely for sure without a proper PoB.

"

鬼殺し a écrit :

So my follow-up query then: should Mana Flows be removed altogether or was it a zero-sense choice in light of this particular build? At a greater remove, are there some nodes that simply shouldn't exist? If so, why do they?

Just how streamlined does the Skilldrasil have to get before: a) it loses its supposed identity as a complex, diverse skill 'tree' and yet b) there are no 'mistakes' or 'newbie traps'?

This is a very important distinction. Right now... The passive tree is full of major flaws just like that. Part of them, I feel, actually do stem a bit from power creep: making the strongest character generally revolves around never "wasting" any points on utility stuff like mana, so you can soak up as many jewel sockets as you can. (e.g, tossing two MotM + UI in the Scion starting area is almost INVARIABLY ideal for any given build)

It's kinda painful; Mana Flows is otherwise a powerful node, but the game's balanced around anyone who'd need mana just needs to learn to handle with just 0.2% mana leech you get out of the hybrid leech node in the Duelist sector. Of course, they COULD try to buff it, but... Attack-based builds still wouldn't use it, and it's just make it a target for some other build types. (like MoM)

PoE's "meta" has gotten increasingly stiff, partly owing to the massive level of power creep present in the game. (the "floor" has largely remained static, but the "ceiling" has climbed by around x100 since 1.x) Hence failing to recognize the meta (which isn't intuitive at all, like a lot of the game) really, really punishes players. It's one of the chief things I credit with the slowdown of PoE's growth. (each "new record" is hardly bigger than the previous one)

Remember, if you remove Mana flows some HoWA players will be upset.

Hey, so what about Flame Surge build?