Boeroer

You know this is great fun for me, arguing about ths stuff. I had an idea... Watch here: PoE Class Build Arena

While discussing the power of certain builds I had an idea for a competition here in this subforum: We won't have PvP in PoE and therefore can't have duels. But maybe we can compete in a different way? Why don't we define certain rules for a class build competition and then keep track of people's results with a highscrore list that gets updated? If we make this a sticky post it could become not only a competition but also a good source of knowledge for class building. And it puts all those building we do to a fun purpose. I'd say every attempt should go into a seperate thread (like we do it with class builds). We could name them "[ARENA FIGHT] <name of the build> (class)" and the results can be put onto the list here (also like we do with the class builds in Andrea's sticky list - which is awesome by the way). So let's say we define the following rules (I'm totally open for different/more suggestions, just discuss): - do a specified encounter (maybe bounty?) 10 times in a row with the same lvl 16 solo char of your liking. This would be more easy to do than 10 different encounters (too much travelling). Or do 5 times this encounter and 5 times that so that the types of enemies are more diversed? - no consumables and resting bonuses - or doping allowed? - spell bindings, chances, holdings, defenses etc. are allowed, enchantments too. - obvious bugs or glitches (e.g. Confident Aim bug) don't count - count the seconds from the start of each encounter to the end and add them up over the 10 attempts. That will be your score. The less the better. Like with racing. - we could define some additional bonuses for retaining a lot of endurance/health or something like that. And if you ask me, we could also give some bonus points for stylish appearance (if it doesn't mean too much fuzz to vote). - we need a rule what happens if you get knocked out in an encounter (penalty seconds or sth. like that?) What do you think? This should be a lot of fun.

I'm not arguing The Dragon Thrashed vs a whole barb. I'm arguing chanter vs. barb. If you want to compare abilities only we could do Dragon vs. HoF. The Dragon Thrashed also does more damage with a crit (not *1.5 though) - so that's not an argument in favor of the barb. The thing is the huge radius. And dps is all the damage you do combined in a given time. If the encounter ends more quickly your dps was higher. Higher numbers that pop out of enemies' heads don't mean the overall DPS is higher. The ultimate test in game is to start encounter and count the seconds until the encounter ends. When fighting bounties solo with a single handed chanter with maxed out ACC and Aspirant's Mark (and focus on self healing rather than deflection) a lvl 16 chanter always finishes the encounter more quickly for me than a barb - because he covers ALL enemies. With 22 INT and 22 PER and 20 MIG (doesn't need to be 30 - I try to argue with numbers that you can have every encounter without too much fuzz) - an item with Overseeing and the Voice of the Mountaintop he will cover an enormous radius and will hit with over 120 ACC with his chant without ANY buff. Cast Aspirant's Mark at the start of the encounter from stealth and go in. You will have killed the whole group more quickly than any barb. Maybe in theory, on paper and when everything goes smooth the barb could end the encounter more quickly - but in reality I don't see that happen too often - you will get interrupted, maybe go prone and then tour DPS stops. And as I said: the chanter can do other stuff while chanting - like dropping 3 fireballs on enemies' heads or stuff. A barb can't do this without stopping his swings. As I said: during many tests I did not encounter a barb who could kill - let's say the Ogres in Elmshore - faster than said chanter. An I did solo runs until that point with both. You seldomly have the perfect encounter with a barb where you reach all enemies with HoF. Sometimes you have casters standing elsewhere and you have to pull (=loss of dps). Sometimes you get disabled. Maybe in theory, against training dolls, the damage output of a barb can be higher, but I doubt it's the case when you actually play the game.

Only the ACC malus of the shield (if any). Some abilites work with the single handed +12 ACC bonus though - like The Dragon Thrashed and White Worms. Maybe there are other spells/abilities that have this "feature", too.

It's certainly not. DPS is not only the single target damage, it's the combined damage he does in the whole AoE. Do a solo fight against any bounty on PoTD (more enemies than the barb can cover with carnage) with a chanter and then a barb and then we talk again. The chanter will kill all foes a lot faster every time. One of the many advantages of the chanter is that he doesn't stop chanting when he's prone and his chants don't get interrupted. At lvl 16 with normal stats (optimized, but not fully buffed with consumables and stuff) he will deliver a Dragon Thrashed chant with 60 to 80 burn AND 60 to 80 slash damage every 4 seconds in a very, very big AoE which no barb can ever achieve. I did tons of solo fights with both classes to find new powerful builds and while I really love barbs there's nothing that kills mobs faster than a chanter with Dragon Thrashed - not even wizards. Even if we think about optimzed HoF which is very powerful - that can go horribly wrong or it's AoE is not big enough to kill all enemies. The chanter just has to stand there and let them come. Plus: He can always lob a few AoE spells on the enemies' heads while burning and slashing them. And then there's two of them - instead of casting those +5 buffs on the barb (which they will likely achieve with lvl 1 phrases) the party performance would be a lot better if they both would sinply chant The Dragon Thrashed. You wouldn't even notice if the barb left the party, frustrated...

It only works for ONE ally of the paladin, not for all. If you test it again with the paladin and one single other party member you will see that it works perfectly well. You can see that only in the combat log (look up the hit rolls), not on the character sheet.

It's +5 as far as I know. Those buffs are nice because they last so long. But if both chanters would stack-chant "The Dragon Thrashed" your barb would look like a wet noodle slapper in comparison, no matter how hard he hits.

Since in solo mode you will outlevel most foes: Eye of the Storm may also be good. I don't know if it prevents flanking altogether when you can't get engaged, but running around with Wild Sprint and suffering from no disengagement attacks is quite handy. You can get Ryona's Vambraces without fighting the Alpine Dragon. You just need 17 RES in order to unlock the dialogue options where you can help him with his soul issues. He will give you the Vambraces as reward. You can still kill him later. But maybe 17 RES is hard for you to achieve?

Ah great!

I hate it.

That's right. Although a weapon with prone or stun on crit does more for your endurance and health pool than draining (which dosen't profit from any healing bonuses by the way). Enemies who can't fight back because they are disabled usually don't hurt you.

Rofl - the last one sounds like some serious fun. Should be connected to Skaen.

If you pick Veteran's Recovery and Savage Defiance as early as possible and fetch Fulvano's Amulet early (and later Shod-in-Faith, too), and also go for 8 survival in order to get 40% healing bonus from camping (meaning +65% together), you can also dual wield at the early levels without getting knocked out. You will be even tougher than a dual wielding fighter because he won't have any self healing ability besides Constant Recovery and less endurance and health. But of course you will lack a bit of ACC at first because you put everything into sturdyness as soon as possible. But that's better than getting knocked out all the time and doing no damage at all while lying flat on the face. Later, after some levels, there's enough room for dps talents/abilites. With a party, you can achieve 14 survival and have +85% healing bonus. But when solo you will also need some lore (dragons!) and mechanics when solo. I did a PoTD solo barb with focus on self heals and dual sabres and it worked pretty well even in Act I. And the more levels you get the more awesome your endurance and asp. health pool will be - as you said. Max CON is also fun with a barb. After lvl 11 (Heart of Fury) that solo run became a walk in the park. My solo runner had those stats: MIG 20 CON 20 DEX 02 PER 15 INT 18 RES 03 Frenzy, Bloodlust + Blood Thirst as well as dual wielding and Two Weapon Style make up for the low DEX. Very sturdy - esp. because of sky high fortitude. Was a lot of fun.

I'm on a 5 year old laptop with a GeForce 555M, so... But hey! It used to be top notch back then. It's true: Cail is so difficult only because I want to get Tidefall as early as possible.

It's a bit sad though that you need to sacrifice a talent point in order to get acceptable unarmed damage. It would have been nice to be able to loot some more stuff for unarmed fighting. THings like the sandals, maybe knuckle dusters or pit fighter gloves that give you a second damage type or wounding or stun on crit or something fancy like that. Would also allow for enchanting.

Also note that Twin Stones is quite hilarious with Driving Flight. Flying rocks everywhere, changing directions after hits. I once tried to do a melee ranger build with The Grey Sleeper and tried to proc Twin Stones + Driving Flight often, but sadly 5% is just too bad without carnage to be worthwhile.

I searched for the thread about Vicious Aim + spells but can't find it. But I found another one that says that my previous sayings about Marked Prey are not quite right. The stacking of the 20% damage with multi projectile tings doesn't occur on the initial target, but on the target that gets hit by Driving Flight - but still nice.

@fiddlesticks: With Blunderbusses I didn't test and I can't remember what Loren Tyr said about it who looked it up in the code. But I assume it's the same with blunderbusses. Twin Sting hasn't two projectiles per shot but shoots two times without reloading phase - but it's two seperate shots with recovery in between. So Marked Prey works normally with Twin Sting, giving 20% fo each shot. Envenomed Strike (I assume you meant that, not monk's Enervating Blows?) works with wizard's Blast and the AoE splash of Citzal's Spirit Lance as well as druid's Rot Skulls - that's it. Sadly, not with Driving Flight (and not with carnage). Vicious Aim does indeed work with several spells. Loren Tyr (again) said in a post which ones work with it, but I can't recall exactly which ones. I assume that those were all the ones which work with Pen. Shot as well, and some additional. Surely Missile spells were in that group, too.

For me, Cail the Silent will always be the most difficult of all the dragons. Also because my frame rate drops to 5 fps in that stupid cave...

No. Not much. Only raising MIG and speed will do more damage. Savage Attack only gives you +20% of the really whimpy base damage of fists. Novice's Suffering's bonus comes after that. So you would trade -5 ACC for an extremely low DMG buff. The same reason why 3 PER works: grazes only reduce the base damage of fists. But the bonus from Novice's Suffering then gets added. So there's nearly no difference between graze and even crit. This lets the build do very consistent damage. As peddroelm said, only MIG has an effect on the bonus of Novice's Suffering. I never tested the hater talents with NS, so I was wondering if they may be an exception. Another plus for Ryona's Vambraces: they turn misses to grazes: fine thing for this build.

That sounds really cool. I take it that you don't have Sandals of the Forgotten Friar yet? Would you say that with Bloodlust+Bloodthirst+Frenzy it would be wise to put on Ryonas Vambraces and also take Vulnerable Attack for 8 DR bypass (and maybe adding Garodh's Chorus and Barbaric Retaliation for double retaliation that is not crush?) - or would you think that it's better to go for more speed and take Gauntlets of Swift Action and no Vuln. Attack? Since you only can boost your damage significantly via MIG and scaling maybe the DR bypass is worth the slower attacks? I mean Blood Thirst takes away some of it. What do you think? Or even go for Glittering Gauntlets (if you manage to get them) for the AoE dazing maybe? Do you know how talents like Wilder Hunter behave with the fists' damage? Do they also only raise the whimpy base damage or maybe the bonus of Novice's Suffering, too, like MIG does? Same with the Bartender's Ring? If those things work differently from talents like Savage Attack they might be a good pick...? I'm fleshing out a wizard pike build atm because the testing of Spirit Lance + Knockdown + Runner's Wounding Shot + Envenomed Strike + Clear Out against bounty parties went so extremely well that I decided to make a build out of it, purely focused on 2h melee. Arcane Veil + Wizard's Double is really good in the early game, too - so it's not too hard to solo with a pike as a wizard even in the early game.

Watch out! That elephant has painted toenails!

An maybe also after I posted this: Stacking Disorienting

Ah, and I forgot: Stunning Shots of the ranger now also works in melee. It means perma-stun most of the time if you're fast enough (high DEX + Swift Aim + durgan steel) and your INT is not too low. Most enemies die after very few hits/bites if you combine wounding + stun because the pet then gets +95% DMG which is awesome with that high base damage they have. And they crit a lot because of the stun, too. Since you will flank with your pet a lot, you can also skill for a lot of survival and go for max dmg bonus against flanked targets.

Monk: When using Full Attacks with a bash shield you will attack with the bash first and then comes the main hand weapon. So yes - 2 attacks with bash, not 1. That's the reason I recommend it with Torment's Reach. Bash is an ability and therefore gets +1 ACC per level. With Bagradr's Barricade your ACC will only be a few points lower than that of your main weapon with Weapon Focus. I guess 5 points or so. The bash ACC therefore is surprisingly high. Barbaric Blow is only good when you dual wield. With a pike I would skip it. Stacking Disorienting and Interfering got nerfed: doesn't stack anymore. Tall Grass on a barb is a great setup. Reach is good for the best placement of the centre of carnage. Hours of St. Rumbalt and barb are also big friends. No reach, but also prone on crit and annihilating - and two damage types. Ranger Marked Prey now marks a target and you and your pet will do +20% weapon base damage to that target. ACC is also higher if I recall correctly. Wounding Shot is better with 2h, yes. The combination of Tidefall + Shod-in-Faith boots and maybe also Veteran's Recovery on a ranger makes his pet do enormous damage, prolongs the life of the pet and the ranger. It's just no tank but is sturdy enough for an offtank. Rangers have lowish endurance and health but their base deflection is OK. If you let your pet engage first you won't run out of health. The pet has no health bar which can be abused with excessive healing. Think about your paladin. Lay on Hands and the Wayfarer talents can keep the pet alive for some time. Rangers now also have 2 healings for their pet per encounter. And the pet can feign death. Rogue The Full Attack abilities are ok. They also work with Badgradr's Barricade by the way. So if you don't like the idea of a monk with it, you can use it on a rogue and skill for all those full attack abilities. It worked quite well for me when I used this setup for the Devil of Caroc. I combined it with the stunning hammer Godansthunyr. That led to a lot of crits with the bash which triggered Thrust of Tattered Veils. That also works with Deathblows by the way. Or - what I totally forgot: maybe a rogue with a reach weapon can balance out his squishyness while he's still able to dish out melee damage. Tall Grass would be good (if the barb won't take it) or even Llawran's Stick (has speed). Durance's Staff is also nice: it has two damage types (crush/burn) which makes it the only reach weapon which has two damage types instead of only one.