I appreciate much your and Crate team efforts in supporting and making GD better. I would like to pay your attention to poor gear support for non-caster Mage Hunter builds.
Arcanist and Inquisitor masteries grant us skills that support 3-elemental ranged builds. In theory we can play such kind of builds, but if you take a look at last two Build Compendiums you won’t be able to find non-caster MH buildin. It’s no surprise, I played around with ranged Mage Hunter builds and was disappointed by poor gear support and bad gameplay.
For 2h ranged build I tried to start with this Runebinder’s set build and played around with gear setup. The results were … not impressive. There are no suitable 2h elemental ranged weapons, while other builds based on different masteries combinations beat these ones.
Situation with dual ranged MH builds is little bit better - we have Luminari set and (Myth) Arcanum Sigils. However the set grants support only for Inqusitor skills and together with Arcanum Sigils (that has poor support for Arcanist elemental related skills) can be more effectively used for Inquisitor + Demo builds. So even builds like this one are still not good enough not only compared to other builds but also in terms of gameplay.
Do you understand, how attack builds gain damage? You use a “defalt attack” skill, coupled with WPS skills to multiply weapon damage, then add resistance reduction to elements you deal.
Now ask yourself, what does Arcanist master bring here?
Default attack? Nope
WPS? Nope
Resist reduction? Nope.
So why in the hell you’d want to use Arcanist for such a build? No wonder it sucks. Try using Demolisher (default attack, resist reduction), or Shaman (default attack, WPS, resist reduction) first, maybe?
Arcanist is the mastery made for CASTERS, period. He shouldnt be used as “secondary”.
Yes, builds mentioned in links are underoptimized and I mentioned that these builds were like a start point in my testing. Would be great to hear feedbacks based from GD community on this.
This is one of the main reasons why I would like MH to get more support and to give GD community more builds diversity and new expirience.
IEE + Inner Focus grant us flat & % elemental damage, % crit damage and OA. Arcane Will boosts total damage as well. Arcanist also give us good support skills like Nullification, Mirror and Sphere. Inquisitor mastery will complement the build with WPS, Seal and Aura. We can use weapon with default attack or component granting it.
This statement is false in general. There are at least melee builds with Arcanist mastery.
You can get that with gear, devotions or other masteries. And all that doesnt have as significant impact on resulting DPS as RR do. An extra 35% RR alone trumps all OA, flat damage & crit damage Arcanist has.
As i wrote above, a RR alone from Thermite Mines, Curse of Frailty or Wind Devil trumps all those bonuses together (and costs far less skill points, which are finite).And you’re wrong, Inquisitor is MAIN mastery for your build, while Arcanist is supposed to complement is somehow. But i think you’d better just get Demolisher instead. OR Shaman, if you dont like how mines work.
Which ones? Those, who are are better with another mastery instead of Arcanist? The only “melee” build with Arcanist i can imagine is Callidor’s Tempest one…
Your mastery choice should fit your build. Dont try to “fit” a build into certain masteries. For example, you can do Forcewave build with Soldier alone. You can get any second mastery, but some will be strickly better, while others dont.
I tried range Magehunter several times and strugle the same problems. May be giving Shard of Beronath, the base elemental AA replace, % RR to IEE could help fighter type Magehunters and at the same time no abuse holes for Vindicators/Infiltrators etc.
Hm, what kind of type this build is - caster, melee or ranged? If your planned thread topic is pretty close to mine we can join feedback in this one if neede.
I have theory crafted 2H and 1H + caster off hand. Not impressed what I have been able to do, but I need to testplay first sinceI can not base feedback only based on Grim Tools
I made plenty of complaints about how bad Mythical Arcanum Sigilis was for Mage Hunter gunners when AoM was first released. It fell on deaf ears. That really killed my enthusiasm for the build concept. IEE + Inquisitor’s ranged skills just seems so obvious to me… : /
Reckless Power is really unnecessary on this weapon, it should had been IEE instead. Elemental Mage Hunter would never use Reckless Power over Censure.
Generally true, but not always. This is true at low levels of cumulative RR and for relatively low damage boosts. If you have cumulative RR up ~100 and you have the choice between 40RR and 100% more damage from flat/%…the latter is better in this example (as that RR will only equate to slightly more than 40% damage on a 100Resist mob). It also depends if your damage is spread around or you have a primary spam attack.
Inquis brings to the table 30+% + relic 10% + 32(elemental storm devotion) = 62 elemental RR
That’s not bad for a lazy all-elements resist reduction. Then there are some items that give more -%RR elemental. And then there is %RR devotions which vary in effectiveness depending on how much -%RR you have…in this case…meh…probably worth another 5-15% on a high-resistance mob and negligible on a low-resistance mob.
After this you have to choose which element you might prefer for even more RR…and that might mean compromises. Gear/devotions
Imho mage hunter is not that hurting…
Now if it is a case of a lack of a suitable weapon for damage, that’s a different issue. But the rune binder weapon is not bad considering it has a free default weapon attack and fairly large base values of elemental.
Krieg Battlemage is. You kinda insults my Aether DW BM build 