just a note I spotted when I looked a your build, you have under-invested in the master bars. Only circa 50 points by level 60 something is low. Mastery bar investment gives flat HP, as well as phys, cunning, and spirit.
I also noticed youâve maxed 2 sets of offensive abilities, as well as maxing pets. using up predominantly all your points.
some tips on allocation to survive more:
invest more points into mastery bars total (split however you want).
max one offensive spammable skill
donât max crowd control skills, unless they double as a nuke.
your nuke only needs to be maxed later in ultimate.
spend points in passive buffs and healing abilities, by lvl 60ish they should be almost maxed.
just because a gear is blue or purple does not mean it is BiS out of what you have currently found. Some of the best gear is âresistant blah of attackâ, or âresistant blah of vitalityâ. These can outstrip many blues and greens.
HP = lvl x 100. even after mitigation, without a solid pool of HP dieing happens easily. itâs not hard to maintain the above ratio. as someone said earlier, its easy to drop 10k HP in the blink of an eye in ultimate. (I lost my death ray guy who had 11k health in < 1 second, GRrrr)
as people have said hybrid pet builds are inherrantly being pulled in too many directions to be a survivable class. You end up with a mix of the following attributes: You do paltry damage, your pets do paltry damage, your pets die too often, you die to often.
I hope you can turn your build around, even if you have to re-equip with yellows to get you farming again (yes Iâve been through elite with mainly yellow items, it is fine).
But I donât think the benchmarks need to apply to every build. Some things are universal - The interactions between Armor, absorption, and Phys Resist, etc. Those can be compared to an incoming damage benchmark.
But youâre right that Log wonât be a good standard reference. I suppose a non-boss would make more sense for such a thing. Thatâd be more relevant to what the OP is experiencing - itâs not the bosses that are vexing him.
What about, for example, a Flesh Hulk in the Plains Of Strife? I think theyâre level 90 in ultimate? So no fluctuation there. Maybe theyâre consistent level in Elite also? Or some other kind of common, end-run, large monster that hits really hard for physical damage. Or maybe something easier to seek out, like one of those big Stonetusks - they charge, arenât easily avoided, hit hard - everyone experiences that. Probably whatâs killing the OP, too.
Pretty much everyoneâs going to take a hit from one of these guys at some point, and the same limited set of prior mentioned defensive stats will determine whether you tend to take like 6000 hp damage from that hit, or something far less. Seems to me that predicting this rough outcome is possible based on real number ranges of your armor, absorption, phys resist, etc, versus the monsterâs maximum damage for that attack. A pretty small amount of variables. Itâs basically a build-agnostic set of conditions, yet useful info to any build.
Knowing some of these number ballparks would clear up a whole lot for someone like the OP, or myself.
As for me, I just finished pushing my first character through Ultimate, but only after giving up on defense and melee around Fort Ikon, and going full kite. I couldnât troubleshoot what my problem was, and didnât know if anything I was trying was helping. I might have figured it out with more experimenting, but re-doing your devotions repeatedly(and farming the crystals to do it) is a real drag.
OK. Iâve listened to all the feedback. I do believe my build just sucks in general for this round. Iâm gonna do a Tank build and play from the beginning again, and actually focus on stats, defense, and less on offense. I never mind fighting, I just get sick of dying (and losing XP all the time)
For those suggesting that my defense sucks, Iâm convinced youâre correct. I spent way too much time worrying about offense in this round of normal and elite, and not enough time protecting myself. And now Iâm paying the price.
Gonna do a Warder this time, and see how that goes. Iâve realized after 4 rounds of play, that offense is cheap to get. Defense keeps the game going.
But donât entirely ditch your old character. The only things you cannot alter is your attribute points, and your mastery expenditures. Meanwhile, attribute points donât add up to very much, except in large amounts. So nearly any character can be salvaged.
I like the basic idea. One of the things Iâve come to develop a love/hate relationship about this game is that I have very little clue about what is really hurting me in ultimate difficulty, especially with my facetankers. I often just have to hope that Iâm tanky enough to deal with whatever is going to come and pseudo-kite if Iâm not sure, kind of going by faith and some vague idea of confidence (or lack thereof). When I want to play it safe I guzzle potions not to heal me but, by the time Iâm in ultimate, often to speed up my health regen (Iâm seeing health potions like a health regeneration boost more than a way to immediately recover health by that point).
I have so much healing coming from hp regen (my witchblade heals at nearly 1k/second with just Blood of Dreeg and over 1k/sec with overguard on top), healing procs, multiple circuit breakers, attack damage converted to health, that I donât even always know when Iâm in danger.
Actually about the only time I know that I got hurt really bad is if I notice one of my circuit breakers going off, which is hard when I got like 7 passives on and all kinds of procs kicking in on top where I got icons all over the place and donât know which ones are my circuit breakers anymore at a glance. The only other time is when I really notice a rapid swing to my health bar before it jumps back to full in a fraction of a second.
It makes near-death situations in ultimate quite often a mystery unless thereâs nothing left but an elite/boss/nemesis so that I can really watch their animations and see what hit me, and Iâm hoping as I get more experienced that will go away, but itâs a freaking steep learning curve when your health bar is going sporadic and healing as fast as itâs taking damage from the sources mentioned above.
Sometimes I wish there was a game log I could check periodically (not always in my face) where I can see like,
âFlesh hulk hits you for 4204 physical damage.â
âFlesh hulk hits you for 3229 physical damage.â
âArchmage reflects 242 damage at you.â
âFlesh hulk hits you for 4987 physical damage.â
Then I can be like, âAh! Thatâs what made my Mark of Divinity kick in, the combo of those three flesh hulks hitting me all at once. I wasnât sure if it was them or if those two archmages and all the fleshwarped guys and eyeball dudes had something to do with it.â
Itâd also help me figure out what enemies do to debuff me. I sometimes see icons I donât recognize, like what are those red + things that Harbingerâs put on you? It doesnât show up as an icon on the bottom-right, just over my character (probably someone can just say RTFM but a game log showing what enemies did to you would help me learn that as Iâm playing). Once Iâm out of the heat of battle (or dead), I can check that log to see what happened to my character while everything was frantic and crowded.
Same with like when enemies get healed by others. OMG â first time I fought Sentinel, I had no idea what the crystals did. He was regenerating health almost as fast as I could deal damage and the fight literally took hours (I had to pause the game and take many breaks). Maybe youâre supposed to read game guides before fighting Nemesis but I didnât bother and learned the hardest way possible. A game log telling me like,
âCrystal heals Sentinel for N health.â
⌠would have pretty quickly taught me what the hell was going on. The first time I fought him was in The Crucible with a level 19 character and a mutator active to boost enemy health regen so I thought it was the mutators doing that. I didnât even notice the crystals.
A combat log or a death recap would be kind of nice yes.
Iâve been using a cheat engine to reset the damage done to you now and then (3rd page of the character sheet), so I can at least get an idea if I take a big hit or several smaller hits at once, itâs something. You can push your knowledge further knowing the damage types each creature does with the visual clues but itâs not always clear.
A combat log or a death recap would be kind of nice yes.
Iâve been using a cheat engine to reset the damage done to you now and then (3rd page of the character sheet), so I can at least get an idea if I take a big hit or several smaller hits at once, itâs something. You can push your knowledge further knowing the damage types each creature does with the visual clues but itâs not always clear.
The sentinel (amongst other fights), well, itâs a matter of being a bit attentive. You see a new object on the screen. A) it could be good B) it could be bad, you donât know. You stand inside and see what happens, then you move and you see what happens, and you compare the results. A) his health is not moving B) his health is going down. Result; okay this crystal must be healing him.
Yeah, I sound kind of retarded not realizing it was the crystals but I was trying a weird thing of just trying to beat 100 waves of aspirant with a level 1 character, no transfers, no checkpoints, no blessings, no towers, just nothing but Crucible (spending tribute points to pick up a few measly devotion points along the way) â just like a stupid challenge I set for myself. Managed it at level 19 after dying a few times on the way but the wave with Sentinel (I think it was wave 99 or 98) was so miserable.
Even with level scaling itâs freaking scary facing Nemesis with a level 19 character wearing yellow gear from the arena store you many waves back at level 12 or so. It was a poison character so I could kite like mad.
To sound a little less retarded, there was a mutator active that said enemies get a healing regen bonus, so I thought it was that. And I had to kite like mad to avoid taking every single hit possible so I was circling the arena a lot while the Sentinel was healing. Likewise if I stopped attacking him for even 10 seconds, I would notice his health bar healed back about 30 minutes of poison-tagging work. I wasnât fighting him in one spot but he was chasing me around the entire arena and healing a large chunk each time he passed the crystals, I think. I used almost all the money I gathered on previous runs where I died to buy potions and used around 400 on Sentinel alone. The last wave with Valdaran wasnât anywhere near as painful.
Gotcha, yes the crucible is a big clusterfck, itâs pretty difficult to tell what is what the first time around if you have not faced such enemies beforehand.
Yeah, I still feel pretty dumb not knowing it was the crystals! I wanted to pull all my hair out when I was so close to wave 100 with that dinky character only to find an enemy that was healing almost faster than I could even possibly deal damage⌠if only I had known!
That challenge was really annoying because I kept deleting my characters who died too much and leveled up too much. My weird goal was to get through 100 waves of aspirant with the lowest level character possible and minimum amount of retries⌠level 19 was the lowest Iâve managed so far, and I had to converge to a poison build with pets used for distraction towards the end waves as I cycled through build idea after build idea that didnât work, deleting character after character who didnât manage to get through it starting from level 1.
Took me about 12 hours for that one character to do it from Saturday night to Sunday morning to the point where I was like a zombie drooling in front of the computer, and about 4 of those hours were just spent fighting the Sentinel.
weakness and pls dev team, you know what i mean so just Open Hand of Mercy