Path of Exile

Caeden said:

Look at melee awakening gems, they most likely drop at the same rate as others but were way more expensive compared for the, presumably, cold meta gems. Melee is a lot of fun in arpgs, but for some reason it doesn’t feel great in PoE. I continue to blame multistrike and the piss poor attack speed combined with the investment curve and advantages (disadvantages?) of melee vs anything else.

People clearly want to play melee (see gem cost), but you have to push gearing to a higher extreme compared to any spell or trigger build.

I’m maybe playing later in the league, but probably not. Trying Grim Dawn and wrapping up some console games I got for Christmas plus various home projects (painting!).

I wonder if CoC will get hit?

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Only melee awakening gem that's higher than the rest is multistrike, and it's that high because it's also the best zombie support.

From poe ninja stats you can kinda extrapolate why it's so expensive, raise zombies make up a whooping 15% of the total builds main skills, and 20% of these uses awakened multi. So while for example on lacerate which is the most popular melee skill that can use it, awakened multi is also 20% of the build, since lacerate is only 3% of the total builds, that means there's 5 times as many people using awake multi for zombies than for lacerate. After that it's also used in other melee skills obviously, but looking down to .1% builds, we're only at ~4% total being melee builds, so along with lacerate we're talking about 7%, 7.5% with the other less popular skills that are melee.

So zombies is still twice the amount(granted the awakened multi values varies between, for example flicker it's 40% of the builds, so it's not exact). Still zombies is the overwhelming cause for the support to be that expensive. Oh and it's also used in 5% of the skeleton builds, which make up 10% of the total builds. Not as impressive as zombies, probably because skeletons tend to be a more budget option, but that's still a fair bit since that's more than the total melee builds.

Oh and there's some possibility the drop rates are weighted too, haven't actually checked, so multistrike could just be rarer than others leading to a natural higher price since it's powerful. Which is another factor, it might also be more powerful than every other option(haven't checked pob mind you but that's a factor to consider, not every awakened support is the same power, some are actually really negligible increases).

LiquidDeath said:

Lone Messenger looks like it is going to be busted.

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I just don't see how any build just incorporates these because of the skill point cost. Smalls cannot be used on their own since they can only slot into medium or large clusters.

OU Ariakas said:

I just don't see how any build just incorporates these because of the skill point cost. Smalls cannot be used on their own since they can only slot into medium or large clusters.

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You can put smalls directly on the tree too it says so on the page. "Small cluster jewels can be placed in sockets created by Large or Medium jewels and sockets on the outermost parts of the passive skill tree. "

And the idea is you get more than just one good thing so it's worth taking the points there.

A lot of builds don't run auras, or can potentially skip auras for 50% more herald effect. It'll mostly be useful if you run MoM or the new mana stuff though. Probably good for the minion heralds too I assume, there's some good notables for them too.

Hollow Palm is one of the first thing they teased, it's just new unarmed stuff. It's different than FB since you get to use dual wield passives(which are getting reworded to show they work with unarmed) so you get a very offensive version of the build but with way less defenses and sockets.

Xequecal said:

Herald of Thunder does a hilarious 5400 base DPS with that node. That's triple that of Flameblast, and you can run around while it strikes. Not sure how you'd maintain the effect against bosses, but someone might figure it out.

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Worm flask is generally what you do to keep on kill effects. You'll use some other spell to like apply curse and what not so you can use that to kill the worms(armageddon brand or whatever).

It makes herald of ice do ridiculous damage too so you basically get big chains that'll pop everything in range.

The main downside is you can't do an autobomber with this, since you need 2 heralds to do autobomber(lightning to kill stuff initially then ice to chain reaction). Although with ice and vortex which also casts instantly, you can probably just clear pressing vortex every now and then to initiate the chains. I'm no specialist of this type of gameplay though so not sure how efficient it is especially with last patch's health buffs, and bossing still seems kinda sketchy even with big heralds.

Was looking at the minion nodes and while there's more minion nodes than basically anything else, there's not that many great ones. There's some decent "raw stats" ones, and the skeleton ones seem pretty strong(wither one for chaos skeletons, crit multi one for skele/zombies and impale one is ok-ish to cap impale with support+banner) but nothing really popped in terms of cool thing, the one that makes your stuff unkillable for 4secs after summoning is probably the most interesting one to deal with annoying bosses that vomit aoes with weak minions(SRS, AW, phantasms) since you at least get a guaranteed 4secs DPS out of them.