well, Boneshatter is the best melee build and uses 2H Axe or Mace. don't know if that is what you are looking for, but it does fit the power fantasy of melee pretty well. if you haven't played it yet, its easy to get going and is very, very satisfying
for caster, can save a lot of money by going staff early on, since 6L staves are quite cheap. just slap some essences and go (make sure it is a regular staff, not a warstaff). You could also aim for a unique staff. Annihilating Light is used fairly regularly - a lot of Sparkers are using it. check poe.ninja for reference
tbh, for staff, any spell casting build can adapt to using one instead of DW or 1H+shield. the reason why many people like shields is to get stuff like suppression or influenced mods. also lets you shield charge. if you can find different solution to defense, then don't need the shield
The bucket of stats like elemental resists and spell block you get from a shield is just bonkers before any stats on the shield itself. Shield charge and Tempest shield are also both great.
On September 01 2023 06:52 Sermokala wrote: The bucket of stats like elemental resists and spell block you get from a shield is just bonkers before any stats on the shield itself. Shield charge and Tempest shield are also both great.
True, yeah, that is sort of my problem with it all. You can adapt a build to staff, but then you need to find those defenses elsewhere, and inevitably they will come from concessions of DPS. Apart from the fringe cases mentioned, staff caster doesn't seem to be very good, so I hope they buff staves somehow. I did learn a few new things from the responses, however, so thanks for the recommendations. Might check out the sparker staff.
I guess it's an open question what GGG's plans will be going forward. I imagine they've put very little thought toward it so far since they were planning to kill off POE1. Now that they're keeping both and POE2 is doing very dramatic changes to how weapons work, I wonder if we'll see them start experimenting more in POE1. There are certainly a lot of redundant weapon bases for them to experiment with - see wands and the recent split to flat damage and spell damage/cast speed.
I mean, staff defenses aren't all that bad, you can get high block with some investment as a spell user. The thing is, left side does not offer spell supress so that one won't be in your build (at high quantity) which is a shame.
My last staves build was a Holy Relic Guardian in 3.12 before the changed Fortify. That was really cheap and strong back them, one of my most solid characters of all time, reaching my highest lvl at 98 while playing SSF.
As said, it was even more defensive than what could be (easily) achieved now as it had max Fortify at all times, Infused Channeling, close to max block and 15k armour while Cycloning around. Was a sick Heist char.
In my noob opinion, the left side has been getting gradually better with defenses. Spell suppression is nice, but there are other options, like + max res combined with "phys damage taken as", uniques like Lightning Coil.
Overall, the game seems to be somewhat well-balanced and fulfilling that old promise of being able to pick up anything you want and have fun.
On September 02 2023 15:38 HolydaKing wrote: I mean, staff defenses aren't all that bad, you can get high block with some investment as a spell user. The thing is, left side does not offer spell supress so that one won't be in your build (at high quantity) which is a shame.
My last staves build was a Holy Relic Guardian in 3.12 before the changed Fortify. That was really cheap and strong back them, one of my most solid characters of all time, reaching my highest lvl at 98 while playing SSF.
As said, it was even more defensive than what could be (easily) achieved now as it had max Fortify at all times, Infused Channeling, close to max block and 15k armour while Cycloning around. Was a sick Heist char.
I played Holy Relic in Kalandra. It was quite tanky but felt really bad, especially in lakes, because my relics would die in the moments where I needed them most... It was either crushing everything or 0 dps. Easily one of my worst starter builds.
The last staff builds I played, which felt good as a starter, were Earth Quake Ignite Elementalist in Scourge and Frostbomb Elementalist in Heist (Pledge of Hands, before Archmage nerf). So nothing I would consider "meta" in the slightest. I think there are some ele caster builds which can use the triple damage staff?
I played only one week because my computer performance was terrible with very long load times and a lot of game crashes. At the end of the week it was unplayable.
Now, I've ordered a new motherboard, cpu, ram, etc and I will setup it in some days, so I expect to be back to PoE soon.
For now I'm playing Flicker Strike but when I save some currency I will create a Forbidden Rite Pathfinder with Mahuxotl's Machination. It sounds fun.
On September 02 2023 15:38 HolydaKing wrote: I mean, staff defenses aren't all that bad, you can get high block with some investment as a spell user. The thing is, left side does not offer spell supress so that one won't be in your build (at high quantity) which is a shame.
My last staves build was a Holy Relic Guardian in 3.12 before the changed Fortify. That was really cheap and strong back them, one of my most solid characters of all time, reaching my highest lvl at 98 while playing SSF.
As said, it was even more defensive than what could be (easily) achieved now as it had max Fortify at all times, Infused Channeling, close to max block and 15k armour while Cycloning around. Was a sick Heist char.
I played Holy Relic in Kalandra. It was quite tanky but felt really bad, especially in lakes, because my relics would die in the moments where I needed them most... It was either crushing everything or 0 dps. Easily one of my worst starter builds.
The last staff builds I played, which felt good as a starter, were Earth Quake Ignite Elementalist in Scourge and Frostbomb Elementalist in Heist (Pledge of Hands, before Archmage nerf). So nothing I would consider "meta" in the slightest. I think there are some ele caster builds which can use the triple damage staff?
The relics dying is a problem early on, but once you have Empower and a +2 +1 staff, it stops being a problem (getting Empower is the hard one). Before that, definitely don't use Minion Damage gem, IIRC Í used Meat Shield instead before that for similar tankyness while losing not much dmg.
Back then, I had Geofri's Legacy which stopped existing, which was better than Geofri's Crest is now. But sure, Kalandra was a dogshit league mechanic for it, I can believe that. The scaling of Kalandra was just BS so them dying there doesn't surprise me.
For Heist, which I mostly played with it, it was splendid when I was geared.
I'm pretty disappointed with it. I thought there'd be a better swath of balance/qol changes to TOTA given how long they took with it. I don't think it's actually fixing any of the major problems (excessive scaling, inability to "go sideways", frequent one-shots, etc). It doesn't sound like they fixed anything with the turtle; I don't see 20% less HP having an appreciable change. If anything, it sounds like TOTA might be worse after the patch with how they buffed most of the Chieftains plus also buffed their AI.
yeah, I'm a bit underwhelmed too. there were a few good QoL fixes, like the auto dialogue and the loyalty tatoo fix.
but overall seems like they want it to be a mechanic where you either have 40 mil dps, or you have a specialized zDPS build and desparately avoid the turtle
The turtle feels pretty much unchanged. AI overall seems buggier. I've gotten enemy Chieftains to just stand in place and stop doing any action a couple times. In multiple matches, I've had their defenders constantly attacking into my base instead of staying to defend. The forfeit button is completely and utterly useless. I'm still logging out at the end of each tournament to roll rewards. In the one round I actually did need to forfeit, my totem wasn't even dead so I still had to log out. In retrospect, I think that loss was in large part caused by the buggy enemy AI not following TOTA rules.
Overall unit balance feels worse; basically, it seems like there are more enemies capable of chunking or one-shotting you than pre-patch. The net affect of the formerly weaker units being stronger is that you are disadvantaged as the player, since you gain less effect from building good teams. In other words, the enemies' miscellaneous teams are now, on average, stronger. The change that forces Chieftains offer different units/items the next round after you buy them is also a net negative for the player, since you now have fewer opportunities for good units/items.
The Chieftains now follow you around more and seem to aggressively defend their totem. It's really tedious getting to the point where there's 1-3 enemy totems alive, one of which is the enemy Chieftain, but they refuse to leave its side, tacking on considerable time to an already-won match while you wait for its giant HP bar to be whittled down.
I saw tech that if you see a turtle on the other team you have to take out your flankers and leave that spot blank if you want to win.
Anyway flicker strike as I've learned is an absolute bling build. its not viable until you've sunk in lots of div and have manged to go through the most infurating leveling run that I've done from my first one when my weapon halved my attack speed for some reason.
EPT
