I haven’t played since 2020. All of my auto attack builds get destroyed in crucible now. I used to farm the heck out of 150-170 glad with my DW cold melee Infiltrator. Now, I cant get past 160… Same story with my chaos DW melee. I spent some time changing up devotions, components, and augments. Didn’t do much.
Is AA good anymore?
Additionaly, what IS good/good-enough nowadays? I like to make my own builds but I dont want to spin my wheels pursuing a dead end either.
meta changed because of v1.2 adding sunder etc, so builds get more chonk and most glass cannons are much less glassy, this applies even more for facetanking AAs that take extra punishment,
higher HP and DA is now the norm compared to before, armour rating has more value than previous too where phys res was king.
Grey recently added this to their “toxic 20” elaboration
@Cheev Imo what you should focus on is your builds because most probably they can be improved a lot. A general meta is way less important than that. I’d import your builds to Grim Tools so that someone can take a look at them.
not saying to be a meta slave
but if playing 5yo builds where 10k hp and 2k da was the norm,
1.2 changing the game so much that 20k hp 2800da is the norm is then the sign of significant patch changes over time
so those could be immediate/initial areas to look at for potential build tweaks
I agree I am sure there are big upgrades to be made. My concern is not only to my existing AA builds, but also in the direction of “what is good/good-enough” nowadays"? I say this because yes, I would like to update my current builds to be strong again, but I also want to make new builds.
However, I dont want to spend time making a build for a skill that kind of sucks due to some nerf 2 years ago that I dont know about, you know?
I think ill make a separate post for my infiltrator to look for help beefing him up to 2026 standards.
DW melee is still very good and will always be good due to great single target damage.
The game is getting more balanced, shitty skills getting buffed with time rather than other way round.
sunder wasn’t the only change in 1.2
enemies also got their dmg dialed up on bunch of skills, (but their phys dmg has been reduced too now)
i personally struggle to tell the exact nuances apart, but the top gang also says debuffs, fumble, slow etc are much more impactful and annoying now and making specially melee AA struggle harder
So needs a bit more chonk these days to compensate, but can then be totally fine
can totally be done, just adjust your baseline build approach/stat goals
Like how there used to be a "get +45 resist overcap"rule, just do that with hp etc now instead to accommodate 1.2+ changes
To reply to your earlier comment, my Infil does have good DA @ 3k but only 13k hp lol. I changed some stuff around and got to around 15.5k. If 20k is the new norm, then I know what direction to go in first!
Regarding the additional changes, I have seen some people talking about fumble… That was never really relevant back then AFAIK. Would you say defensive devotions like giants blood, the chariot, and the tree are common/necessary nowadays?
Is your damage optimization on point though, It’s very important in Crucible to kill fast enough to not get surrounded. Like more important than defense there I’d say.
more valuable sure, but still build specific, they arent’ universally so good that you’d go out of you way to get it on ex a belgo pierce dmg infil (and “never” Tree outside true pets or HC builds/mega regen stackers)
But on other infils like chillwhisper Chariot might totally be awesome
Also what tqFan said, you still want to maintain dmg, you don’t want to trade off half your offence to get a smidge extra defence since you need to clear Cruci waves faster than ex SR, where sacrificing a lot of dmg for tankiness can easily be fine with more controlled/slower pulls and clear
*on that note, i’d probably say from a personal scrub player perspective, SR is much easier these days than Cruci (because of said clear control)
Probably Korba RoS Infiltrator the best DW Cold Melee Infiltrator know, what do you think? Since infiltrator doesn’t have native DAR and RoS buffed nicely
@Gnomish_Inquisition That is very interesting to hear because back then it was the other way around- crucible was easier than SR. Above is my grimtools currently. Way off that 20k lol.
Regarding the weapons, yes, I did duplicate that drop as I was not prepared to spend another several weeks trying to get the same affixes. Nowadays getting a weapon with relevant affixes is almost guaranteed so I do feel like less of a cheater lol.
@Cheev I tried to improve your character as much as possible. Didn’t finish. Didn’t change affixes. Maybe someone else can pick up. Honestly it wasn’t that bad to begin with. What I did
1 Spectral Longsword - the amount of flat Pierce in various places + on WPS is absolutely worth converting over another Chillstrife, can be reset farmed from 2 vendors
improved Life Leech
improved Health Regen
Chariot
better WPS
Seal
Fabius shoulders are way better than what you have
