The first character I made used a 2h weapon and melee skills, but by the end of ultimate, melee was impractical due to insufficient defenses, forcing me into a caster role to reach completion. As I bring another melee character up toward ultimate - a cold-based, 2hand blademaster - the defensive issue looms large.
I haven’t seen this variation discussed in the builds section, and have not yet developed a sense of what makes for a sufficient defense. Troubleshooting defense late-game may send me hurtling back to the forums instead of being able to troubleshoot myself with reasonable facility(which I’d prefer).
So the desire to gain more intermediate/advanced understanding of survivability leads me to the question:
How do we project and assess necessary survivability by end-ult?
What elements of survivability are usually the most dominant considerations for an experience/intermediate+ player? (max resists is a given, I’m talking beyond that)
Categorical sources of survivability could be devotions, skills, gear, materia, and augments - am I missing a category?
In terms of relative efficiency, do any of these categories tend to excel in one area to the point that they should usually be used for survivability or a particular stat?
Are there any numeric ranges to aim for in a particular stat to have average minimum viability? HP pool or DA for example.
Do some stats diminish over time in defensive potency? I have heard Armor argued as one such. And do some stats become more powerful by late-game, relative to a weaker early-game?
How much difference does a skill/devotion-buffed shield make? Or an un-buffed shield? How much is lost by lacking a shield, and how generally might a build compensate?
An easy response on this topic is “it depends,” but that’s also entirely unhelpful. If a general comment about something isn’t quite possible, perhaps comment on a more specific example? Or a case study?
Additionally, this assumes melee survivability, and some measure of required fight sustainability. If the character depends on avoiding getting into the fight and by not taking many swings, then that’s not relevant. I’d imagine at least partial-facetank of bosses is the realm of defense that’s in question.
I appreciate your help fellas. If a good amount of knowledge is condensed here, this can allow people to figure out the problem in their build on their own. So I imagine that if this thread could possibly help a lot of players in their fist Ultimate run.
Fumble chance helps a lot for melee because it also affects Nemesis. Attack damage converted to health is another thing that helps quite a bit in tanking but doesn’t work very well against Nemesis. Skills that decrease enemies’s damage like Oleron’s Might helps a lot in surviving.
Great point, thank you. And as that’s a multiplicative value, so I’m guessing %damage reduction shines in late game, but less in early game, I suppose.
War Cry also provides this. And the Arbiter relic’s Gavel of Justice, though that’s not so good out of early game…
Are there other sources? Do Nemesis resist this?
Also, how’s fumble work? I don’t recall reading any mechanics on that.
Some skills have a change to fumble the enemy. Meaning they will miss much more often. Circle of Slaughter modifier from Ring of Steel and Searing Light from Flashbang have a change to fumble. Nemesis can be affected by this.
Nemesis are also affected by damage reduction. It’s what i use to help me tank them and helps really well. Oleron’s Might skill does this and it comes from Oleron’s Blood component. There’s a prefix called Tyrant that reduces the target’s damage everytime you hit with it. It shows up only on weapons though. And yes, reducing target’s damage is much better in Ultimate.
That’s how the defensive measures list looks for me:
Resists. 80% is good, but above that is very powerful. Look at it this way: with 90% resist you’ll take twice less damage than with 80%. Physical resist is special, hard to find but effective against most hard-hitters.
Damage absorbtion. Permanent (like maiven’s) is great, procced (like from turtle devotion proc) is fine.
Healing. This one goes into two categories - numeric and percentage. The latter is only decent when you have 12k+ hp. Numeric is quite hard to find in decent numbers if you’re not occultist or nightblade. Which is a shame, imo. 5 hp per sec bonuses when average nemesis hit is ~1500hp is a joke. However, there are some procs that grant temporary, but strong hp regen boost. Those are good to have.
Attack damage converted to health. Very strong vs regulars, mostly useless vs nemesis. I would say you should have a few % of it on any melee char, it gives comfort.
DA. Reduces damage spikes. Works good, but hard to find in decent numbers.
Reduce enemy’s ability to attack. This includes various debuffs, such as reduced enemy’s damage, fumble, confuse, stun, freeze, reduce enemy’s attack/cast speed etc. Apart from reduced enemy damage, the rest won’t work against strongest bosses, but will save from regular mob zergs.
Dodge. You like lotteries? I don’t. Don’t build around it.
Life leech. Non-existant.
Save procs in general are good.
But the most effective defense currently is… having really HUGE burst dps. If you can kill fabius in 5sec you don’t give a flying sh*t about all above, all you need is enough hp not to get oneshot.
Building a toon that can withstand fabius for a minute or two is much more complicated.
Regarding shields:
It’s not just the shield mechanic in itself that makes them useful.
Compared to two-handed weapons you also gain another item that you can put augments and components on.
Compared to dual-wielding weapons you gain the advantage of being able to use components that you can’t put on (all) weapons.
Another point is that shields often offer solid defensive stats.
There are loads of shields that offer good resistances within their base stats and that are rather easy to obtain.
Take a look here: http://gracefuldusk.appspot.com/items/Shields/
You have a chance of obtaining a Warden’s Bulwark or Fortress when killing the Warden.
You have an (almost?) guaranteed drop of a Bernard’s Slightly Chewed Buckler when killing Pusquill the Hoarder (or was it the other one?).
You encounter “Obsidian” mobs throughout all the chaos rifts and so have a good chance to obtain Obsidian Bulwarks.
And so on.
And these are just base items. There’s a lot of defensive enchantments that can appear on shields, but also very nice offensive enchantments so that you can have a healthy mix. Scroll down the page from the previous link to see the list of possible enchantments.
It’s very much possible to get your hands on a shield that gives you 50+ percents worth of resistances, and with a little luck you can get 100 and more percents worth of resistances just from one shield; plus all the other stats that shield and it’s enchantments may offer, plus components and augments that may give you additional tankyness.
So even if you take no skills and no devotions that enhance your shield, using a shield can still be a good decision if you are lacking survivability.
Or if you e.g. use a pistol but absolutely want that fire aura that Enchanted Flint provides.
And given that it is very likely that you already put loads of attribute points in physique, chances are that you will rather be able to use a shield than be able to use a caster off-hand.
Yes, this shield has a 100% drop chance and with the right affixes you can get 100+% P&A resistance or two Granted Skills.
Most builds aren’t that dependent on Physique that you cannot afford to put 20 or 30 of your 90 APs into Spirit instead of Physique. And, depending on your build, some Caster Off-Hands are so powerful that you simply don’t want to go without them.
Something I’m particularly interested in is the ‘efficiency’ of defensive investment, per category. So let’s say I decided that I need to increase my survivability by some limited amount, X. I can achieve that goal via either equipment, or materia, or augments, or devotions, or even skills. Which category would represent the most efficient means of achieving X?
I’m guessing this will depend on the particular brand of survivability - DA, HP/sec, etc. So are there any acknowledged trends on what those categories of investment excel at? For example, something like “Augments are the best way to max your resistances” or “Chest slot materia is the best place for DA,” and so on? To be clear, I don’t know if those statements are true, I just made that up.
Or maybe looking from the other direction is more useful: If you want some particular type of survivability, avoid plugging it via Y. Example, “If you want DA, you shouldn’t be sacrificing your chest slot augment; look elsewhere.”
And unrelated to any of that, I’m still interested in numeric ranges. How much HP to aim for, how much DA to aim for, how much armor to aim for.
And also the matter of armor: Are there diminishing returns over time? If I could conceivably invest in other forms of defense by sacrificing armor, would that be a worthwhile trade by end-ultimate? As usual, the specifics of this question aren’t important, but rather the general idea.
Let’s say enemy deals 10k pure non-physical damage. With 80% resist you’ll take (1-0.8)*10000=2k damage. With 90% resist you’d take (1-0.9)*10000=1k. Pretty straightforward.
Oh … right it makes a lot of sense, pretty basic math too. I didn’t think about it like that, I feel really stupid right now.
I was thinking that you took 10% less damage of the total amount (so the 10k of the example), so I didn’t get it when people said 50%, but it’s the same thing finally so it looks like I got confused for nothing it seems.
Seems people are unable to comment on the majority of the thoughts in the original post. But this runs in contrast to the fact that many people make a handful each of ultimate-completion characters. Surely that would grant insight into the tendencies of what’s needed for survivability. Some predictability.
What gives?
My sword and board witchblade survives by being super tanky with shield and Overguard. My poison witch hunter survives by spamming aoe freeze, stun, petrify, fumble, and impaired aim effects. My pistol pyromancer survives by lifesteal and by killing everything before it can hurt him. My TSS spellbreaker survives through truly monstrous health regen. There’s very little in common among them beyond having decent resists.
Speaking of phys resist…
I’ve been on a receiving end of Moosilauke’s two-handed slam yesterday. With 1.5k armor and 18% phys resist I got 11.5k damage and died instantly.
To be clear, I’m not asking ‘how do you survive.’
I’m asking instead about mechanical thresholds that roughly make your ultimate character predictably survivable in melee.
If you’re planning a new character, you might estimate how much of X type of survivability is needed. You might make determinations: “With this setup, I won’t need another defensive constellation once I’m 85, I’ll instead take an offensive constellation.” Or, “I won’t need to put any more Grave Dust on items, I’ll boost my damage instead”.
Making that assessment hinges on understanding the rough data that this thread is about.
Also, I understand the means by which a character survives are varied. But as I mentioned in my original post, most of this defensive data is relevant from one hit-taking character to the next.
So for example, if your character uses a lot of armor, then how much armor is enough? Or if it depends on soaking and regenerating big hits, then how much HP pool or HP/s will be sufficient? DA? Etc.
If I confused people in the original post, then my apologies. But the questions posed there are mostly un-addressed.
