Staying alive without ADCtH

After finally reaching my 900th hour on GD, I realised I still have no idea how to survive without ADCtH. All my builds use %WD in some form or another, or have base ADCtH on skills.

So my question is this: how the hell do caster builds (e.g. Trozan, Stun Jacks, etc) survive?

I’m not talking about good defense, but more keeping HP high - and while some builds can Mirror chain, there are many other non-Arcanist casters that seem to survive fine, but looking at the guides, I can never figure out how…

High armor, damage reduction (flat & %), health regen, avoid/deflect, Crowd controll (like Freeze, Stun, Fumble, Impaired Aim)

So you’re saying the main ways they stay alive is by mitigating the damage in the first place? How about against enemies that do lots of damage anyway - is there some secret way to get that health back, or is it just careful play + devotions etc?

Wait, we have a stat like this in GD?

HP regen is just a casual stat, I would not bother focusing on it. Some skills actually provide a full gear worth of HP regen as heal and therefore HP regen is quite useless. This is not TQ, where you can negate over 60% of the damage with just HP regen. In GD, if you lack appropriate resists or armor, only at least 5k HP regen is a viable amount, other than that just don’t bother. I’d rather base on HP potions at this point, even one HP potion is worth more than 5k HP regen (the only downside is cooldown).

AH AH AH AH…STAYIN’ ALIVE, STAYIN’ ALIVE.

Jokes aside, casters tend to use cooldowns to stay alive. Mirror, mark of torment, etc. Heals also help a lot.

Even a small value like 500/second can be good to negate small DoT’s but sure it is not something you should count on when facing a mob that deals huge damage

I have 200+ HP regen on most builds that use Occultist and I somehow never notice it negating anything. :stuck_out_tongue: I even had a build that had 400 with perma buffs and over 1.2k with buffs, still didn’t do shit because if you get more than one debuff then the HP regen is basically 0. You should never look at HP regen unless you play a caster and use Hungering Void and have no ADCtH (then you just try to get as much HP regen as possible to only not lose additional HP, but usually you have any kind of leech so there’s no issue in that).

Unless Crate adds a… idk… relic with +1 to all skills and 200 base HP regen, this stat will be considered useless/filler stat.

Behemoth and Charriot are used as a pseudo adcth band-aid for casters.

I kinda forgot about those two and I still pick Chariot for probably every build I make. Well except for the ones that don’t use nodes that it needs, so physical builds or tanky for example.

Behemoth is quite weak, but you can get that heal for 3 points, so it’s kinda okay.

Tree of life proc seems to have fallen out of fashion lately

Yeeehaaw! It’s kinda expensive too. I think only tanky builds use yellow nodes, or at least in my case do, so picking it as a main is kind of pointless. You simply waste too much. It’d be way more often picked if it was Blue/Green instead or any other color than yellow.

Crate, buff yellow stuff in the devotions. How do we even call those, btw? Lol… Affinities… right…

You make my Ishtak pet builds sad

Still, 90% of builds don’t even look at top right corner of the screen if we talk about devotions. :stuck_out_tongue:

I have Druid with Tree of life,Behemoth,Ishtak and Bat.In campaign and Cruci up to 150 combine with 17k health,Maiven,Mirror,health potion and totem are enough to survive even without single skill with life steal.Only problem is burst damage.Ofc this build is not very fast.

Best way to stay alive for builds without adcth is to get adcth. What’s more to say.

Wendigo totem.

Or mitigation basically, but hard to stay alive vs burst still. ADCTH is really much much superior. As a mainly spellcaster, it is quite annoying at the imbalance. ADCTH scales with your damage, while for spellcasters, you really gotta invest in sustain which takes up skills/slots/devotions…

Another great way to survive, IMO, is abusing CDR and circuit breakers. Often times these can keep you at death’s door until a heal or a pot comes off CD.

It’s a little tricky to pilot, but here’s a YT video of me clearing 170 with no adcth, and no health pots.

Almost all of my two dozen characters aim for Tree of Life, fight me.

I actually like light of empyrion a lot.

It was the devotion which really pushed my darkblaze pyro to the next level.

Doesn’t phantasmal blades have a good amount of ADCTH?