Hi, I wanted to give my feedback on how vitality melee performs currently in end game situations, to be more precise in Crucible.
Classes- The most logical class selection is Ritualist. Dual source of RR, auto attack with easy conversion, WPS skills. But surprisingly in my tests Death Knight is far more stable and consistent. Cabalist is probably option too and OK have some unfulfilled potential. The problem of Ritualist is extreme squishiness and also incredible clunky build, since you needs to be piano casters, debuff with swarm, Ravenous Earth, Bone Harvest and put Wendigo Totem. It’s really inconvinent.
DW melee vs casters- Usually going melee gives you big advantage -AdctH. But since vitality spells already have inbuilt, you lose ground, cause unlike casters you’re affected by fumble, ground effects and take lot of physical damage. So being DW melee for vitality damage is clear disadvantage.
Gearing-Set is Blood Knight. You can go with Dark One, but it doesn’t have speed. Blood Knight is more or less the only real option. It’s fine but not top tier set probably. Now weapons are bigger problem. For Ritualistic you can try Bloodrender with 100% lightning to vitality. But they suck. At the end you end up using superior Decrees -weapon without attack speed and flat…
Bloodrender need more stats and 50% global cold to vitality conversion. Weapons for my DK are in next paragraph of the topic. Also let’s not forget about the lack of gloves with flat vitality damage and attack speed. Devotions is also more or less fixed, so you can’t utilize conversion.
It does 8 minutes on average. Not bad, but not superb. Weapons have that problem, no flat damage and no conversion. In matter of fact there isn’t way to convert Cadence damage to full vitality. So maybe that’s an idea for the future.
Completely agree with everything.
Melee DW Ritualist is thin as paper despite having huge health pool and adcth. the problen is stats (oa/da), which are hard to get more than approx. 2700-2750 (this is nothing).
Attack speed - can’t achieve 200% even with all procs.
Damage - the strangest thing. Very, very low for some unknown reasons.
About weapons- I suggest turning Bloodrender into a dagger and changing its stats accordingly. And replacing almost useless +2 to Oleron’s Rage with sth better.
Also, wanna see some improvements on Howl of Wendigo.
Yeah, Howl of Wendigo also needs improvement. On paper Howl+Bloodrender should be the go to combo for Ritualists, but is so weak.
Ritualist is thin as paper,agree. You quickly regain your health but you can’t stop it from jumping up and down constantly and you can’t survive AoE damage. At same time you have nothing to kill trash mobs. In casters you can on AoE spells, Acid DW melee have monster procs, cold have Ultos, Blizzard, RoS and so on for other damages. Vitality and Chaos have nothing in that regard. So you can’t kill quickly enemies in AoE range and can’t stop them draining your health.
Yup, like Pierce Belgo build. But it’s hard to kill Nemesis quicker since most of them are swimming in vitality resistances. And your DPS is more or less limited. Definitely with the global Nerf of flat damage sources, the wonky types like chaos, vitality and aether fall behind.
Rah’Zin WH is also able of dealing incredible solo-damage but has its personal problems like the invalid damage type …
But still it’s far more durable and damaging than dw vitality.
But because RahZin was buffed in straight patches. It was even worse before that. But that shows the problem one damage type can have as certain archetype.