I wanted to make a general post about my grasp of GD strategies and gameplay skills and my lack of them.
I have had some success:
LVL 70 HC conjuror
LVL 68 HC BM
LVL 61 HC druid
LVL 40 HC pyromancer
I play HC exclusively and have managed to avoid a single death.
BUT I have no real idea about damage synergies, how to focus on certain damage types and gear my chars to a base of 9k life and close to max res mid-elite.
I’ve had a lot of help with all my chars esp the 70 conjuror and other chars.
I base my gear choices.
firstly on res and life and secondly on dps.
But that leads me to find it very difficult to focus on one or two damage types, leaving my chars with low dps.
I don’t understand how to max dps while for HC. life and hi res are a necessity.
I’d like to learn more about how damage works, how to improve it without compromising my life pool and hi res.
I’m finding this hard. And don’t copy builds. I like to make my own which is prob why I struggle so much in the dps department. I really struggle with synergies/ skills/ gear/ devotions. These have to be very well balanced for HC and I’m not good at it. I’m good with survival, but lack basic game mechanics understanding.
I’d like to gather a more in-depth understanding of how HC players reach high damage while maintaining max res and a good life-pool.
By picking the “proper” cross-classes, skills and damage types, and taking advantage of the related mechanics and gear.
If there’s misunderstanding of mechanics, this could help.
I basically told you nothing. There are skills/mechanics/damage types/gear, which work better than others. Or to be more precise - it’s typically combination of factors. There are “hidden” mechanics and interactions.
Reading the forum eventually helps. But what helps the most is playing the game and making conclusions.
Honestly, if you want to get better, play one of those perfected builds first, especially one with a leveling guide. Learn to understand what makes things tick, THEN come back and do your own stuff. Learn the difficulty curves at various points in the game, the highs and the lows, then apply it.
Furthermore, watch the patch notes. Something gets changes, buffs, ect? There is a good chance a build can be made based on it.
Lets give an example of a good checklist for a “good” build.
High single target DPS. The endgame of GD is very heavy on the high hp bosses you gotta kill, and a low single target DPS will render it painful. The best defense is a good offense quite frankly, because if you kill the boss in 10-20 seconds, that means you only need the tools to last 10-20 seconds against them. This also is the best increase to your rate of farm, which improves how fast you can gear up and become stronger. If 1 build can full clear all the bosses in Bastion of Chaos in 8 minutes, while another takes 20-30, you quickly will see the 8 minute build fly through items to upgrade with because they get 3x more items per unit of time.
Sustain. While you can function without it, it makes everything FAR easier when you got it. Most builds that don’t have innate sustain can grab Giant’s Blood or Tree of Life devotions to give themselves a bit of sustain, but others bring a shitton of innate heals like Shaman’s Wendigo totem healing him for like 12% max hp per second, Nightblade’s 33% max hp heal every 5-10 seconds (duel wielding or not), or Occultist’s 30% max every 15. Other builds will take ADCtH (lifesteal) to survive instead, or perhaps have spells that have innate ADCtH like Sigil of Consumption, Devouring Swarm, or Phantasmal Blades. Worst case scenario, most melee builds can slot a Haunted Steel on their weapon for healing at a minor cost to DPS.
Durability. Ultimately, doesn’t matter if you heal 20k HP per hit if you have only 5k HP and can get 1 shot. Most people consider aprox 8-10k decent, with melee builds wanting to go a bit above that if they can. I have had 1 ultimate level character with less than 7k HP, and it has 4 different survival tools to help make up for that low hp budget. Range gives you a bit of “durability” in that you don’t have to start taking hits as quick, and that you can kite. Most people as far as I know don’t even realize that you can dodge Shadowstrike, melee hits, ect. Knowing how to read the wind-up of an enemy’s swing, and evade the melee attack even at melee range can give you openings to go back in safely for a few more seconds before you gotta do it again. Best way to resist an attack’s damage is to never get hit by it in the first place.
Resistance reduction. Resist reduction gives you “true” dps, which is DPS that no matter what, you can depend on. An example would be that you have 10k DPS in cold, and 30% cold res reduction. It means that no matter what, you have at least 3k DPS added to whatever action you were doing. That 80% cold res mob that you did 2k DPS to? Now you deal 5k DPS to it. That 0% cold resistance mob that you were doing 10k DPS to? 13k now. Resistance reduction can be one of the most important multipliers to your damage output, and is exactly why most people focus on mono-typing their damage, because by mono-typing your damage and abusing a high resist reduction to that type of damage, you can potentially increase your average DPS by 2-3x easily. 50K DPS means nothing if the enemies are all resisting 80% of it, while the 30k DPS with enemies resisting none of it will end up doing more damage.
Oh-shit procs/abilities. Effectively, abilities or procs that can save your ass when stuff goes south. Be it Mirror’s 100% damage absorbtion for 3 seconds, Soldier healing for 66% of his max hp when he drops below 33% HP, or Nightblade’s Blade Barrier letting him eat that big hit that would have killed him for no damage, or maybe Demolitionist’s Blast Shield that makes him take a flat -1500 damage from all attacks for 4 seconds after his blast shield procs, rendering you immune to most fast but low damage hits. Oh-shit abilities/procs give you a massive extra level of safety. Many builds call them Circuit breakers, because the main point of it is that when you get overloaded, they trigger and save the system (your health bar).
Medium “burst” AoE, aka crowd clear. It isn’t really needed to kill most of the trash mobs in higher difficulties. Often the best play is to just bum-rush the healers first, heros second, and bosses last. Most trash mobs do little enough damage to worry about, even for squishier builds. By having “burst” AoE to drop at the start of a fight, you pretty much will take out any healers in the trash from the start, and reduce most of the enemy projectile spam.
Now, you don’t need everything on this list, but its pretty important to have at least 4-5 of the things on it. The best builds pretty much have all 6.
Also, there are some slots that are better prioritized to defense, and some that are better prioritized to damage. Your head, belt, gloves, relic, and weapons will grant you most of your damage. Rings, amulets, shoulders, medals, and chest gear end up about 50/50. Boots and legs are almost purely used defensively. Very popular boots are the Golemborn Greaves, level 50 legendary boots that are the king of defense. They are only beaten out by really good rolled Exalted Treads (the highest level of basic boots). Often you will see people craft tons of boots at level 75 trying to get Stonehide Exalted Treads of (something related to your build, or another defensive roll). They are a very easy lot to cram a lot of your resistances in if you’re struggling in ultimate. Most of the time for pants, people tend to want to farm the Witch God pants of some type. Good rolls on them can easily beat out most legendaries for a lot of builds.
Rather than DPS in a DOT build your main focus should be on stacking different sources that applied said damage. If you reapply the damage from the same source (i.e keep shooting DEE) the damage will not stack and will simply refresh itself.
The damage done per second when all the sources have been applied to your target is termed as a “tick”. In a DOT build your main focus is to achieve high ticks. In this game ticks can crit, but if the first tick doesn’t crit then the successive ticks wouldn’t crit either the reverse is also true. The first tick critting would mean the successive ticks crit as well.
The only DOT based builds that exist in this game are built around Bleed and Poison, both have immense support in both gear and devotions.
One cannot build around Internal Trauma, Burn, Frostburn, Electrocute and Vitality Decay despite all of these being classified as Damage Over Time types as the purpose of these damage types is to act as a supporting damage type to their “raw” damage components namely Physical, Fire, Cold, Lightning and Vitality respectively.
Not true, I have a build that mainly deals Frostburn damage where it’s the main damage source and beaten Valbury on Ultimate with it, so it definitely is viable.
I’m sure some others have builds based on some of the other DoTs, as well.
As for the OP: read the FAQ and advanced mechanics guide, the info is out there and plentiful.