Path of Exile

Khane said:

I wasn't trying to be pedantic. In the grand scheme... Some skills dont require targeting and you're not clicking but holding, not sure what would change there with WASD movement. I guess those scenarios would feel more awkward tapping W instead of left/right click at first simply because we aren't used to it. I'm assuming there would also be a "force move" type hotkey you could still bind to mouse click that would function the same as mouse movement does today in those click scenarios.

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I didn't think you were being pedantic. I thought I was playing like an idiot because there was a much easier way of doing a thing I hate doing (kiting with skills that I need to mostly target).

Arbitrary said:

I didn't think you were being pedantic. I thought I was playing like an idiot because there was a much easier way of doing a thing I hate doing (kiting with skills that I need to mostly target).

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The strafe movement associated with WASD would actually alleviate this quite a bit, you're right. Much more convenient with WASD movement. Forgot about that.

Tried to play some last night on the TX server. Constant disconnects so I changed server and will try again today.

Some time starting at the end of last league to his league I started crashing and they're 100% related to some MTX or a combination of them. I wish I could turn off everyone else's shit but that's just not a feature.

Deathwing said:

What version of ignite did you do? I'm considering poison SRS but I hate minions.

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I was on firestorm for quite a while until eventually switching to fire trap + frostblink.

Frostblinks damage isn't the best but it's enough to clear maps and using it offensively to dive in to or near packs means the cooldown is like <.5s usually.

Fire trap for the tankier stuff and bosses. The setup was fine? Kinda squishy even with a lightning coil due to low HP pool, and trap throwing speed was a problem forever trying to spam traps against bosses.

Arbitrary said:

Some time starting at the end of last league to his league I started crashing and they're 100% related to some MTX or a combination of them. I wish I could turn off everyone else's shit but that's just not a feature.

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This was just disconnecting in the open world, no MTX around. Ping said good but it was extremely laggy. Getting into western waste zone took about 2 minutes with good ping. It was somewhat better today.

Deathwing said:

You're really selling it This is the frostblink starter Subtractem got a ton of shit for?

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Uh, maybe? I don't watch any of the twitch nerds besides Mathil

It's the same idea as the old vortex ignite setups tho - cold to fire in the frostblink link combined with the elementalist ignite node makes some huge initial hits for some pretty large ignites.

It's better than I'm making it sound honestly - I finished the whole atlas and my eater/exarch invites without much trouble. I just don't see how you'd scale the damage any further than that though, which is probably fine for a starter? My final PoB was claiming like ~3.5m ignite dps for frostlbink and 4m for fire trap, so the damage isn't bad, but that's close to the cap as far as I could tell without getting in to truly absurd gear like +2 scepters with big multi, +2 amulets with multi, etc.

Deathwing said:

Something like this? poe.ninja

I think the throw time on fire trap would drive me nuts. I avoid arcanist brand setups just cuz that 0.8s cast time can get you killed sometimes.


In other news, first legit use of Ravenous Passion goes to...a bow build. Mathil's build doesn't count, I think he overestimating Penance Brand dps.

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Looking at this just makes me laugh at melee even more. It's actually completely fucked that GGG just gave the middle finger to an entire archetype.

Deathwing said:

Something like this? poe.ninja

I think the throw time on fire trap would drive me nuts. I avoid arcanist brand setups just cuz that 0.8s cast time can get you killed sometimes.


In other news, first legit use of Ravenous Passion goes to...a bow build. Mathil's build doesn't count, I think he overestimating Penance Brand dps.

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Yea this looks about like the same idea. I like this guys tree a lot more than mine tho - I spent way more points over in the templar area and didn't do all that travel down there for suppress.

The trap throw speed was the biggest downside by far though. It's abysmally slow, and your best damage support is swift affliction which means you end up needing to throw them really frequently on bosses.

Penance said:

Looking at this just makes me laugh at melee even more. It's actually completely fucked that GGG just gave the middle finger to an entire archetype.

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Yea but where's the line on what counts as a melee skill? Wild strike is a 'melee' skill, a strike even, and looks just as absurd as that bow spam does. Lightning strike and frostblades are both also strikes and explode the screen just as much.

Like yes heavy strike sucks major dick, but who cares? I'm much less concerned about the totality of viability of every bad attack skill than I am the general QoL of having to press a button to cast your spell or attack directly. The reason that above video looks so good is he has crazy huge attack speed, which is the solution to 99% of the problems people have with playing 'melee' builds.

They invented this problem themselves for a lot of skills way back during uh, legion i think? When they revamped the melee animations as part of their big pseudo-rework of melee. All they did was actually make most strike skills feel like actual dog ass to play because the attack speed is weirdly divided up between non-equal animation times in a 1-2 kind of attack sequence.

You can test this yourself easily with frostblades compared to nearly any other attack skill. It didn't get the new melee animations back then, and just uses the old basic attack animations and as a result feels far 'snappier' and more responsive to play than almost any other attack skill at all levels of attack speed. The gap closes a bit at the extreme high end when you start getting above 7 aps or so, and in general is 'fine' for just sitting there holding right click on a boss, but when attempting to move around maps and quickly blast pack after pack it's really apparent and shitty.

Strike skills are weird, but investment into additional strikes is great for clear, shit for bosses if they don't spawn adds. The default splash also helped, but again for clear. Ronne's right that basically attack speed fixes everything. With multstrike you're basically running into the Spell Echo problem Deathwing hates where you're "stuck" until you get enough cast speed. The way around this was slams, but they nerfed Seismic Cry (but actually buffed a TON of sources of double/triple damage to compensate) which was the end of slam meta. Plenty of strike skills are more than viable for mapping and anything but Uber bosses and some (Dual strike of ambi, Bonshatter still) are viable for Ubers.

If you want to make a striker I highly recommend Dual Strike of Ambi, just make sure you get +1 or +2 additional strikes. The fact you can just use a 2.0 speed offhand makes it so much easier to clear the speed valley where the skill can feel bad, especially with Multstrike. There are actually plenty of valid strike skills, but the mechanics of Dual Strike of Ambidexterity just solves two of the biggest problems, damage and attack speed, inherently.

Yea the new dual strike is the poster child of melee being totally fine as long as you have like 7-10 attacks per second.

It's as melee as you can get and relies on the pathetic inherent splash and extra strikes to clear, but it does these things totally fine and feels plenty smooth because it attacks so fucking fast and isn't locked in to the shitty updated 1>2 attack animations that most things use.

And you just get to shove a paradoxica in your main hand and do ~10m DPS for almost no investment!

Right, and that's what boneshatter did. You got 2m damage for free if you built the defensive sustain. This not only solves damage, but also speed which is crazy. I'm thinking the buffed Ice Crash could be similar, but mandatory dual wielding is unfortunate as your offhand has to be more than a speed stick.

There are a lot of strike skills you can play ranged if you're man enough to invest in like +10 strike range. Mathil had a character a league or two ago which could single target strike from max screen length. It was a VERY melee skill too, I just can't remember what it was. Double strike maybe? It looked pretty funny because he could dodge most all boss attacks by just attacking from mid-long range. It might've been Molten Strike actually which though has projectiles is still very melee.

While we're on about melee junk, current project is trickster int stack HOWA nonsense:


I'm the fattest asshole in the world and it's pretty difficult to actually die, but the damage is severely lacking so far. I'm not really sure if the problem is wild strike itself or HOWA just not being up to snuff these days or what, but I've got a long way to go before the damage feels anywhere near acceptable, Missing 6th link, need a timeless jewel for at least 10% double damage, get the remaining claw crit wheel - there's some stuff left I can do, but I'm not sure it's gonna take me from ~500k dps to 5m ya know?

Usually HOWA relies on a bunch of more modifiers somewhere, namely curse effectiveness on a mark or bottle faith or nasty cluster jewels with omega increased damage. And WED every place you can shove it.

I looked and an Ephemeral Edge is very competitive if not better if you switch claw nodes for the sword nodes. You'll also gain more ES even though you said you were a tanky boi already. The problem is the 1.6 attack speed to 1.3 attack speed difference. You could also look at Energy blade but that will cut your EHP nearly in half, but tricksters are already good to go with 4-5k ES for the most part with good ghost shrouds. If you go Energy Blade or Eph Edge you can also get the 3% ES Perandus jewel and throw that fucker in the Ranger jewel and you'll get something like 60% increased ES with the sword wheel in effect.

Yea this started as an ephemeral edge build but the 1.3 base attack rate was just misery to play with. The main reason I'm even looking to get rid of HOWA is the attack rate still heh.

Energy blade is interesting - its got better attack rate and dropping to ~5k ES probably isn't that huge of a deal given trickster recovery.

I've got a synth claw base ready to go, but the cost to finish crafting it is fucking huge:



2 divines to lock prefix + 5 divines for a veiled orb + 2 more divines for multimod (assuming it hits a usable unveil like ele pen or DD) is more money than i've invested in this character in total already.

Maybe this was just secretly a dual strike build all along with ephemeral edge and a brightbeak lol

Upon further inspection of the market trying to craft an int stack claw is a complete waste of money.

You can buy full T1 perfect ele claws for under 20 divines:

ronne said:

They invented this problem themselves for a lot of skills way back during uh, legion i think? When they revamped the melee animations as part of their big pseudo-rework of melee. All they did was actually make most strike skills feel like actual dog ass to play because the attack speed is weirdly divided up between non-equal animation times in a 1-2 kind of attack sequence.

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That shit pisses me off still to this day every single time I make a new character and have to deal with it in the first zone.