The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
Please vote in the Forum Structure Poll. Polling will close at 2PM EST on January 21, 2025.
They arent "tagged" as a dot though. Dot tagging typically is some form of other "type" damage. So yes a channeled ability is "damage over time" but what you use to mitigate it is elemental resistance or armor. A "dot" from the "dot" mindest is usually an ailment of its own typing that you either have a specialized resistance too or you have the ability to completely mitigate with ailment/status protections (like d4 and poe). Lagon's beam is blockable, dodgable etc so yeah it is a channel just a strange thing in the game. Put into memory heh. I typically have more problems getting smushed.
They arent "tagged" as a dot though. Dot tagging typically is some form of other "type" damage. So yes a channeled ability is "damage over time" but what you use to mitigate it is elemental resistance or armor. A "dot" from the "dot" mindest is usually an ailment of its own typing that you either have a specialized resistance too or you have the ability to completely mitigate with ailment/status protections (like d4 and poe). Lagon's beam is blockable, dodgable etc so yeah it is a channel just a strange thing in the game. Put into memory heh. I typically have more problems getting smushed.
Scorching Ray is explicitly only a DoT, it does not hit and is tagged and scaled and interacts accordingly. Blight works the same way.
Incinerate in D4 is busted and weird, but it doesn't crit and allegedly scales with DoT damage as it does 'burning' damage but isn't actually applying the burn status effect.
They arent "tagged" as a dot though. Dot tagging typically is some form of other "type" damage. So yes a channeled ability is "damage over time" but what you use to mitigate it is elemental resistance or armor. A "dot" from the "dot" mindest is usually an ailment of its own typing that you either have a specialized resistance too or you have the ability to completely mitigate with ailment/status protections (like d4 and poe). Lagon's beam is blockable, dodgable etc so yeah it is a channel just a strange thing in the game. Put into memory heh. I typically have more problems getting smushed.
I...may be misreading this, but I think this is incorrect? Less familiar with D4, but let's go PoE.
Scorching Ray is tagged as a "DoT". It causes "burning", which is a Damage over Time effect very specifically. It behaves like a DoT in every way. It doesn't "hit", it scales with Damage over Time effects. It's also resisted with fire resistance, just like every other non-DoT fire effect. But it's a Damage over Time skill just as much as Essence Drain is. Essence Drain, which is resisted with chaos resistance very similarly to a non-DoT chaos spell or effects that hit. Now you can get "ignite immunity", but ignite is a very specific type of effect within the broader "burning" category. It is no more or less a DoT than scorching ray, just an extra tag.
So your first part doesn't make sense with Scorching Ray, though it may for D4.
They arent "tagged" as a dot though. Dot tagging typically is some form of other "type" damage. So yes a channeled ability is "damage over time" but what you use to mitigate it is elemental resistance or armor. A "dot" from the "dot" mindest is usually an ailment of its own typing that you either have a specialized resistance too or you have the ability to completely mitigate with ailment/status protections (like d4 and poe). Lagon's beam is blockable, dodgable etc so yeah it is a channel just a strange thing in the game. Put into memory heh. I typically have more problems getting smushed.
Scorching Ray is explicitly only a DoT, it does not hit and is tagged and scaled and interacts accordingly. Blight works the same way.
Incinerate in D4 is busted and weird, but it doesn't crit and allegedly scales with DoT damage as it does 'burning' damage but isn't actually applying the burn status effect.
Yeah scorching ray and RF are kind of strange exceptions arent they. But they are explicitly kept off of status ailments to be usable as a main damage ability. Yeah incinerate is really strange but D4 is in a strange place overall I will always agree with that. There will always be exceptions my statement still remains largely true though.
I think Disintegrate is in the weird 'actually a DoT and doesn't hit' channeled beam space in Last Epoch, too, for that mechanic on the player side. So there's some consistency.
I think Disintegrate is in the weird 'actually a DoT and doesn't hit' channeled beam space in Last Epoch, too, for that mechanic on the player side. So there's some consistency.
snip
It is really fun to use too. There will always be some exceptions. It is just that the example in question is a janky exception. /shrug. That is all I was agreeing to. I dont think there really needs to be much more said about it. PoE is generally very good on its typing and consistently. D4 not as good but still ok. This example is a member of a list.
Patch notes. They state they are not going to fix profane veil bug which is understandable I guess just not popular as it is pretty broken and if their stance on fixing bugs doesnt include that mid league then I can see an argument on how that is "bad". I dont really care either way myself tbh. They also say that cloud gather on falconeer will be nerfed/"fixed" as the servers side cals have "crashed servers".... kind of yikes tbh but also funny.
Yeah there is also not much in the way of Ward fixes (have to see what they do with the veil interaction) which are pretty broken too. Hopefully they can get a handle of it. Evidence is mounting that they have unity spaghetti problems.
I got bodyslammed by "beam is actually a dot so fuck your defenses against Hits" doing a tier 3 Lightless Arbor.
It's been so long since I played high-level LE I forgot that the higher tier added a cone in addition to the twin sweeping beams and I Shifted straight into where that cone hit, Dodge and Glancing Blow being my main mitigation strategies and pretty useless against dots and I went from full health with some ward stacked to zero before I could blink.
I probably need to figure out mitigation or more likely git gud on the timings and locations of the killer beam attacks. Rogue is probably by far the squishiest class in the game.
Patch notes. They state they are not going to fix profane veil bug which is understandable I guess just not popular as it is pretty broken and if their stance on fixing bugs doesnt include that mid league then I can see an argument on how that is "bad". I dont really care either way myself tbh. They also say that cloud gather on falconeer will be nerfed/"fixed" as the servers side cals have "crashed servers".... kind of yikes tbh but also funny.
Mostly bug fixes though.
The Leaderboard thing is interesting to me. If this is their plan going forward seems each cycle’s leaderboards are going to be whomever exploited an early bug before it got patched and then stay frozen until the next cycle.
Hey they fixed the invisible model after transforming bug, wooh.
I'll never care about leaderboards, so no strong opinions on the mid season non-nerfs. Some of those skills do need to be nerfed as they're obvious outliers, but I'm feeling pretty good with CoF taking the market out of the equation and will continue to not use the broken nodes.
It's...pretty liberating to not need a cutting edge meta build to experience so much of what the game offers after watching literally 50+ builds I loved in PoE get wrecked hard with the nerf bat. As long as they continue their trend of more gently nerfing stuff like they did with 1.0 instead of "nerf it to make all but the most die-hards stop playing it entirely" in the GGG mold I will be happy. Some of the new stuff may need some pretty big nerfs, but some of them are also pretty big busted.
Patch notes. They state they are not going to fix profane veil bug which is understandable I guess just not popular as it is pretty broken and if their stance on fixing bugs doesnt include that mid league then I can see an argument on how that is "bad". I dont really care either way myself tbh. They also say that cloud gather on falconeer will be nerfed/"fixed" as the servers side cals have "crashed servers".... kind of yikes tbh but also funny.
Mostly bug fixes though.
The Leaderboard thing is interesting to me. If this is their plan going forward seems each cycle’s leaderboards are going to be whomever exploited an early bug before it got patched and then stay frozen until the next cycle.
If it's legit bugged, yeah they should just fix it. Overtuned numbers should stay (unless you mess up and add some extra 00s at the end or something), but yeah fixing a skill with totally unintended behaviour should be gotten rid of.
They're generally pretty good at listening to the community and mentioned they'll take feedback in the post, so let em know it. People definitely are!
Okay, seriously, what is it with this game wanting me to play a fire wizard. I got to play a bit more today on my beastmaster and ended up finding a unique catalyst that powers up disintegrate and fire damage and channeling, a set ring that increases fire DoT and fire spell cast speed, and a unique helmet that lets you throw elemental novas at a distance, in quick succession.
At this rate I'm going to start a rogue out of sheer contrariness.
Okay, seriously, what is it with this game wanting me to play a fire wizard. I got to play a bit more today on my beastmaster and ended up finding a unique catalyst that powers up disintegrate and fire damage and channeling, a set ring that increases fire DoT and fire spell cast speed, and a unique helmet that lets you throw elemental novas at a distance, in quick succession.
At this rate I'm going to start a rogue out of sheer contrariness.
All I get on my runecaster are necro uniques, it's hilarious.
Some people were talking about slow melee attack builds from the ARPGs of yore a couple pages ago. The closest I've found in this game is janky warcry/tempest strike builds. Most of them work off of triggering spells tho.
Edit: I'm never posting from mobile again, so much time had passed. But lemme know if y'all have any fun melee builds that aren't spin 2 win. I wanna try 'em.
Some people were talking about slow melee attack builds from the ARPGs of yore a couple pages ago. The closest I've found in this game is janky warcry/tempest strike builds. Most of them work off of triggering spells tho.
Edit: I'm never posting from mobile again, so much time had passed. But lemme know if y'all have any fun melee builds that aren't spin 2 win. I wanna try 'em.
My current Warlock is the most fun I've had with the game and probably works with roughly the same loop in a number of flavors, but in my particular flavor I'm not sure calling her melee is honest even if I spend most of my time hitting a melee attack, with curses doing the heavy lifting.
Apply Curse->Transplant into pack->Harvest.
I was Spirit Plague->Transplant (with Bone Curse)->Harvest scaling Curse/Necrotic/DoT (curses, damned) for a while. Spirit Plague goes everywhere and wipes out anything that survives the initial Transplant and few hits of Harvest.
Moving to Chthonic Fissure as my opening curse with Spirit Plague applied on hit via Life's Journey unique so I can go all in on damage increases on SP without worrying about duration or spread, but atm I'm just hitting both manually first.
There's decent tree support for a ton of variants on this basic idea, some much closer to honest melee with curses and/or dots just to scale stuff. Phys bleed, crit necrotic, plague poison, etc., etc...
Only complaint is that the Harvest animation is a little dull.
Kamar on
0
FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
Haven't decided on which specialization to put my mage through
Haven't decided on which specialization to put my mage through
Runemaster seems very good, but also a thing where you have to build pretty heavily around runic invocation and all that it offers. It gives a lot of cool possibilities -- it's one skill that can cast like 15 different skills -- but has its own beat to it.
I'm actually getting really intrigued by the buffs that sorcerer got by proxy of runemaster being introduced. I made all of my sorcerers before .91 when runemasters were introduced, which means all mage classes were missing a skill tree and a few skills with only 2 of the 3 masteries in. Frostwall looks nasty for a lot of stuff, and can be pretty easily accessed by sorcerers (it takes 15 skill points, and there are some very good ward generation nodes in the first 15 points of the runemaster tree). I'm most interested in what it can do for the good ol' ignite fireball build though -- there's a node to convert it to fire, which causes chill to become ignite and frostbite to become fire resistance shred, which is always a great stat to have. There's also a node to pump up its ignites and DoT, one that gives it a fire brand proc that scales on ignite chance, and one that makes it start freaking casting fireballs itself too.
And because it's a Last Epoch skill tree, nodes that make it give you haste and frenzy for crossing through, ward generation, ward generation when enemies pass through....I love how much stuff they pack into that thing.
Yeah, frostwall didn't exist when I first concepted my cold dot guy, but it's definitely going in my build now. Can put out 8 frostbites per second, plus the dot from the wall itself.
I still haven't managed to put together an actual runemaster build though. They can do so much stuff it's hard for me to properly focus a build.
...okay, so I'm not sure I get how this game calculates damage.
So, I grabbed that level 5 mage I had and continued with him a bit, because as said the game is very insistent on me making a fire wizard.Been using disintegrate, but there's a thing that I don't quite get.
My theoretical DPS for Disintegrate says about 900. My Elemental Nova theoretical DPS says about 330. That makes it sound like focused fire on a dude with disintegrate should melt him faster than the nova, right? But that is very pointedly not what is happening. Walking up to someone and spamming Nova in their face makes their HP bar go down like at least 33% faster than walking up to the same someone and holding disintegrate in their face. Which seems kind of counterintuitive?
...okay, so I'm not sure I get how this game calculates damage.
So, I grabbed that level 5 mage I had and continued with him a bit, because as said the game is very insistent on me making a fire wizard.Been using disintegrate, but there's a thing that I don't quite get.
My theoretical DPS for Disintegrate says about 900. My Elemental Nova theoretical DPS says about 330. That makes it sound like focused fire on a dude with disintegrate should melt him faster than the nova, right? But that is very pointedly not what is happening. Walking up to someone and spamming Nova in their face makes their HP bar go down like at least 33% faster than walking up to the same someone and holding disintegrate in their face. Which seems kind of counterintuitive?
What am I missing here?
The tooltip DPS, as is usual for these games, isn't particularly accurate except maybe for comparing gains and losses within a single skill. And even then, if how you're doing damage or the specific stats are changing...
Yeah ARPG tooltip DPS is kind of notorious for being...unreliable.
It does seem to generally work in this with skills that aren't getting too crazy with the effects though. I'm kind of curious what's going on with yours now -- it could just be busted entirely, don't get me wrong. But it generally seems good at tracking DPS that doesn't rely on conditional stat modifiers and stuff like that -- like my scepter that gives +40% damage to ignited enemies will never be tracked, but it seems to track damage and casting speed stuff fairly well, and even DoTs which is unusual.
If I'm taking a stab at making it make sense -- if you have the elemental nova node that makes it do more damage to full health enemies, that won't show up in the tooltip. The one that makes it pierce elemental resistance probably isn't tracked well/at all in the tooltip either. If you have a status effect triggering to raise damage that won't show up either. Aside from that, probably just busted for ???? reasons.
Yeah ARPG tooltip DPS is kind of notorious for being...unreliable.
It does seem to generally work in this with skills that aren't getting too crazy with the effects though. I'm kind of curious what's going on with yours now -- it could just be busted entirely, don't get me wrong. But it generally seems good at tracking DPS that doesn't rely on conditional stat modifiers and stuff like that -- like my scepter that gives +40% damage to ignited enemies will never be tracked, but it seems to track damage and casting speed stuff fairly well, and even DoTs which is unusual.
If I'm taking a stab at making it make sense -- if you have the elemental nova node that makes it do more damage to full health enemies, that won't show up in the tooltip. The one that makes it pierce elemental resistance probably isn't tracked well/at all in the tooltip either. If you have a status effect triggering to raise damage that won't show up either. Aside from that, probably just busted for ???? reasons.
I not only do not have that node, I have nova completely unspecced, I'm like level 15! My current specs are my right click attack (Lightning blast - I still want to see if I can force this into a lightning wizard) and Disintegrate.
And yeah, I know the numbers are unreliable, but generally it feels like it's to the tune of "if you have special skills and stuff it won't count it correctly and will probably be out of whack", not "yeah so you can have a skill with less than half the projected DPS without any weird passives involved and be doing like +50% more damage"!
Given I don't have a way to get the actual base damage of a skill AND apparently the DPS calculation is not just out of whack like I thought but in fact actively misleading, it feels kind of impossible to actually make much in the way of informed choices for skills here without just having to go and test combinations painstakingly!
Yeah, paperdoll dps is a bit of a liar, doesn't account for AOE, armor or resist shred, or contingent effects (does more damage to targets that have ignite stacks or similar wording).
A good example of an item that misreports true damage is the Siphon of Anguish ring that applies Doom on hit. Doom is an ailment with a max stack of 4 that does 100dps per stack for 4 seconds. But because it caps it's of limited damage but the sheet dps calculates off one second which assumes that you're getting the full effect of Doom every second which isn't the case if you are hiring a target more than 4 times in 4 seconds
Yeah ARPG tooltip DPS is kind of notorious for being...unreliable.
It does seem to generally work in this with skills that aren't getting too crazy with the effects though. I'm kind of curious what's going on with yours now -- it could just be busted entirely, don't get me wrong. But it generally seems good at tracking DPS that doesn't rely on conditional stat modifiers and stuff like that -- like my scepter that gives +40% damage to ignited enemies will never be tracked, but it seems to track damage and casting speed stuff fairly well, and even DoTs which is unusual.
If I'm taking a stab at making it make sense -- if you have the elemental nova node that makes it do more damage to full health enemies, that won't show up in the tooltip. The one that makes it pierce elemental resistance probably isn't tracked well/at all in the tooltip either. If you have a status effect triggering to raise damage that won't show up either. Aside from that, probably just busted for ???? reasons.
I not only do not have that node, I have nova completely unspecced, I'm like level 15! My current specs are my right click attack (Lightning blast - I still want to see if I can force this into a lightning wizard) and Disintegrate.
And yeah, I know the numbers are unreliable, but generally it feels like it's to the tune of "if you have special skills and stuff it won't count it correctly and will probably be out of whack", not "yeah so you can have a skill with less than half the projected DPS without any weird passives involved and be doing like +50% more damage"!
Given I don't have a way to get the actual base damage of a skill AND apparently the DPS calculation is not just out of whack like I thought but in fact actively misleading, it feels kind of impossible to actually make much in the way of informed choices for skills here without just having to go and test combinations painstakingly!
Yeah I've never seen it be so far off when the skills are fairly "simple". It's dumb that it is doing that. I will probably try to test it a bit myself today as I also want to level a fire mage alt, to see if I can see anything that makes sense. I don't think the "tri-element" thing would freak it out like that but maybe?
A quick Google does suggest that Disintegrate in particular just has laughably inaccurate tooltip DPS.
...see this is what I get for googling elemental nova but not disintegrate.
To add on, it appears to be the official stance of the dev team that tooltips are meant to be usable for gear upgrades but not skill comparisons:
For me it’s not even slightly useful for that. The DPS on my skills has reliably gone down as I’ve gone up in power level. My build is very based on ailments and it seems that the good items that increase you power by a lot (like a 2LP Mad Alchemist’s Laddle) made my tooltip dps drop by a good ammount.
Got my melee puncture bleed falconer through the campaign. Uses a 2h sword and stacks bleed, gonna grab the 2h bleed sword when I can if I stick with her instead of getting altitis. Probably could be stronger with the spear stuff falconer gets, which includes specific bonuses for puncture+bleed, but the slower speed (spears are intrinsically slower and the 2h sword bonus for falconer is even more speed) and it looking kinda dull kills it for me.
Puncture spam with Falcon Strikes (lotsa bleed) and Dive Bomb (consumes bleed, triggering all the damage and doing multiplicative damage per stack) on CD (no interruption to puncturing with the Intuitive Connection node), smoke bomb as a cooldown for bosses and survival, aerial assault for traversal (with bleed from caltrops, but it's not bleeding enough to warrant using except to dodge stuff).
Like my curse/melee warlock, she blitzed through the back half of the campaign--from what I can tell, she has even more DPS than my warlock did at this point but is a bit squishier (investing a ton of nodes for a mediocre amount of glancing blow and dodge feels pretty underwhelming compared to warlock getting tons of ward gen+less damage per curse+15% damage reduction curse etc). Burned the last campaign boss so fast she couldn't heal herself in phase 2.
AFAIK bleed falconer and warlock in general are both really good, so maybe I'll see how I feel playing something a bit less exciting next.
I have a few others I've played a decent amount. A sword+shield flurry+lethal mirage bladedancer, chaos bolts warlock, a necro build that harvests for a 'death knight' sorta feel...plus like 5 other ideas I've barely touched or not made yet.
Enjoying my altitis for now. But also working my way through the basic monoliths on my curse harvest warlock.
Okay I gotta say I'm pretty letdown by the whole crafting thing. I found a good item that was a straight upgrade to what I had before but it had physical resistance which I'm at like 118%. So I wanted to swap it to Fire resist. AFAIK you have to use Rune of Removal to randomly pick something to remove. Of course I used it once and it removed one of the other affixes but it also used up all of the forging potential. So not only did I lose an affix I needed but I also no longer can do anything about it.
Okay I gotta say I'm pretty letdown by the whole crafting thing. I found a good item that was a straight upgrade to what I had before but it had physical resistance which I'm at like 118%. So I wanted to swap it to Fire resist. AFAIK you have to use Rune of Removal to randomly pick something to remove. Of course I used it once and it removed one of the other affixes but it also used up all of the forging potential. So not only did I lose an affix I needed but I also no longer can do anything about it.
you can also use Glyphs of Chaos to reroll that affix to something random, of course it may or may not be helpful ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Okay I gotta say I'm pretty letdown by the whole crafting thing. I found a good item that was a straight upgrade to what I had before but it had physical resistance which I'm at like 118%. So I wanted to swap it to Fire resist. AFAIK you have to use Rune of Removal to randomly pick something to remove. Of course I used it once and it removed one of the other affixes but it also used up all of the forging potential. So not only did I lose an affix I needed but I also no longer can do anything about it.
you can also use Glyphs of Chaos to reroll that affix to something random, of course it may or may not be helpful ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That's also randomized on which one it changes too right?
Posts
Scorching Ray is explicitly only a DoT, it does not hit and is tagged and scaled and interacts accordingly. Blight works the same way.
Incinerate in D4 is busted and weird, but it doesn't crit and allegedly scales with DoT damage as it does 'burning' damage but isn't actually applying the burn status effect.
I...may be misreading this, but I think this is incorrect? Less familiar with D4, but let's go PoE.
Scorching Ray is tagged as a "DoT". It causes "burning", which is a Damage over Time effect very specifically. It behaves like a DoT in every way. It doesn't "hit", it scales with Damage over Time effects. It's also resisted with fire resistance, just like every other non-DoT fire effect. But it's a Damage over Time skill just as much as Essence Drain is. Essence Drain, which is resisted with chaos resistance very similarly to a non-DoT chaos spell or effects that hit. Now you can get "ignite immunity", but ignite is a very specific type of effect within the broader "burning" category. It is no more or less a DoT than scorching ray, just an extra tag.
So your first part doesn't make sense with Scorching Ray, though it may for D4.
Yeah scorching ray and RF are kind of strange exceptions arent they. But they are explicitly kept off of status ailments to be usable as a main damage ability. Yeah incinerate is really strange but D4 is in a strange place overall I will always agree with that. There will always be exceptions my statement still remains largely true though.
It is really fun to use too. There will always be some exceptions. It is just that the example in question is a janky exception. /shrug. That is all I was agreeing to. I dont think there really needs to be much more said about it. PoE is generally very good on its typing and consistently. D4 not as good but still ok. This example is a member of a list.
The answer -- it depends. Blame Master Roshi.
lol. It is clearly a stacking channeled dmg beam.
AAAAAAaAAAAA
MEEEEEEEEeeeEEEE
Patch notes. They state they are not going to fix profane veil bug which is understandable I guess just not popular as it is pretty broken and if their stance on fixing bugs doesnt include that mid league then I can see an argument on how that is "bad". I dont really care either way myself tbh. They also say that cloud gather on falconeer will be nerfed/"fixed" as the servers side cals have "crashed servers".... kind of yikes tbh but also funny.
Mostly bug fixes though.
I probably need to figure out mitigation or more likely git gud on the timings and locations of the killer beam attacks. Rogue is probably by far the squishiest class in the game.
The Leaderboard thing is interesting to me. If this is their plan going forward seems each cycle’s leaderboards are going to be whomever exploited an early bug before it got patched and then stay frozen until the next cycle.
I'll never care about leaderboards, so no strong opinions on the mid season non-nerfs. Some of those skills do need to be nerfed as they're obvious outliers, but I'm feeling pretty good with CoF taking the market out of the equation and will continue to not use the broken nodes.
It's...pretty liberating to not need a cutting edge meta build to experience so much of what the game offers after watching literally 50+ builds I loved in PoE get wrecked hard with the nerf bat. As long as they continue their trend of more gently nerfing stuff like they did with 1.0 instead of "nerf it to make all but the most die-hards stop playing it entirely" in the GGG mold I will be happy. Some of the new stuff may need some pretty big nerfs, but some of them are also pretty big busted.
If it's legit bugged, yeah they should just fix it. Overtuned numbers should stay (unless you mess up and add some extra 00s at the end or something), but yeah fixing a skill with totally unintended behaviour should be gotten rid of.
They're generally pretty good at listening to the community and mentioned they'll take feedback in the post, so let em know it. People definitely are!
At this rate I'm going to start a rogue out of sheer contrariness.
All I get on my runecaster are necro uniques, it's hilarious.
Edit: I'm never posting from mobile again, so much time had passed. But lemme know if y'all have any fun melee builds that aren't spin 2 win. I wanna try 'em.
My current Warlock is the most fun I've had with the game and probably works with roughly the same loop in a number of flavors, but in my particular flavor I'm not sure calling her melee is honest even if I spend most of my time hitting a melee attack, with curses doing the heavy lifting.
Apply Curse->Transplant into pack->Harvest.
I was Spirit Plague->Transplant (with Bone Curse)->Harvest scaling Curse/Necrotic/DoT (curses, damned) for a while. Spirit Plague goes everywhere and wipes out anything that survives the initial Transplant and few hits of Harvest.
Moving to Chthonic Fissure as my opening curse with Spirit Plague applied on hit via Life's Journey unique so I can go all in on damage increases on SP without worrying about duration or spread, but atm I'm just hitting both manually first.
There's decent tree support for a ton of variants on this basic idea, some much closer to honest melee with curses and/or dots just to scale stuff. Phys bleed, crit necrotic, plague poison, etc., etc...
Only complaint is that the Harvest animation is a little dull.
Runemaster seems very good, but also a thing where you have to build pretty heavily around runic invocation and all that it offers. It gives a lot of cool possibilities -- it's one skill that can cast like 15 different skills -- but has its own beat to it.
I'm actually getting really intrigued by the buffs that sorcerer got by proxy of runemaster being introduced. I made all of my sorcerers before .91 when runemasters were introduced, which means all mage classes were missing a skill tree and a few skills with only 2 of the 3 masteries in. Frostwall looks nasty for a lot of stuff, and can be pretty easily accessed by sorcerers (it takes 15 skill points, and there are some very good ward generation nodes in the first 15 points of the runemaster tree). I'm most interested in what it can do for the good ol' ignite fireball build though -- there's a node to convert it to fire, which causes chill to become ignite and frostbite to become fire resistance shred, which is always a great stat to have. There's also a node to pump up its ignites and DoT, one that gives it a fire brand proc that scales on ignite chance, and one that makes it start freaking casting fireballs itself too.
And because it's a Last Epoch skill tree, nodes that make it give you haste and frenzy for crossing through, ward generation, ward generation when enemies pass through....I love how much stuff they pack into that thing.
I still haven't managed to put together an actual runemaster build though. They can do so much stuff it's hard for me to properly focus a build.
So, I grabbed that level 5 mage I had and continued with him a bit, because as said the game is very insistent on me making a fire wizard.Been using disintegrate, but there's a thing that I don't quite get.
My theoretical DPS for Disintegrate says about 900. My Elemental Nova theoretical DPS says about 330. That makes it sound like focused fire on a dude with disintegrate should melt him faster than the nova, right? But that is very pointedly not what is happening. Walking up to someone and spamming Nova in their face makes their HP bar go down like at least 33% faster than walking up to the same someone and holding disintegrate in their face. Which seems kind of counterintuitive?
What am I missing here?
The tooltip DPS, as is usual for these games, isn't particularly accurate except maybe for comparing gains and losses within a single skill. And even then, if how you're doing damage or the specific stats are changing...
It does seem to generally work in this with skills that aren't getting too crazy with the effects though. I'm kind of curious what's going on with yours now -- it could just be busted entirely, don't get me wrong. But it generally seems good at tracking DPS that doesn't rely on conditional stat modifiers and stuff like that -- like my scepter that gives +40% damage to ignited enemies will never be tracked, but it seems to track damage and casting speed stuff fairly well, and even DoTs which is unusual.
If I'm taking a stab at making it make sense -- if you have the elemental nova node that makes it do more damage to full health enemies, that won't show up in the tooltip. The one that makes it pierce elemental resistance probably isn't tracked well/at all in the tooltip either. If you have a status effect triggering to raise damage that won't show up either. Aside from that, probably just busted for ???? reasons.
I not only do not have that node, I have nova completely unspecced, I'm like level 15! My current specs are my right click attack (Lightning blast - I still want to see if I can force this into a lightning wizard) and Disintegrate.
And yeah, I know the numbers are unreliable, but generally it feels like it's to the tune of "if you have special skills and stuff it won't count it correctly and will probably be out of whack", not "yeah so you can have a skill with less than half the projected DPS without any weird passives involved and be doing like +50% more damage"!
Given I don't have a way to get the actual base damage of a skill AND apparently the DPS calculation is not just out of whack like I thought but in fact actively misleading, it feels kind of impossible to actually make much in the way of informed choices for skills here without just having to go and test combinations painstakingly!
A good example of an item that misreports true damage is the Siphon of Anguish ring that applies Doom on hit. Doom is an ailment with a max stack of 4 that does 100dps per stack for 4 seconds. But because it caps it's of limited damage but the sheet dps calculates off one second which assumes that you're getting the full effect of Doom every second which isn't the case if you are hiring a target more than 4 times in 4 seconds
Yeah I've never seen it be so far off when the skills are fairly "simple". It's dumb that it is doing that. I will probably try to test it a bit myself today as I also want to level a fire mage alt, to see if I can see anything that makes sense. I don't think the "tri-element" thing would freak it out like that but maybe?
...see this is what I get for googling elemental nova but not disintegrate.
To add on, it appears to be the official stance of the dev team that tooltips are meant to be usable for gear upgrades but not skill comparisons:
For me it’s not even slightly useful for that. The DPS on my skills has reliably gone down as I’ve gone up in power level. My build is very based on ailments and it seems that the good items that increase you power by a lot (like a 2LP Mad Alchemist’s Laddle) made my tooltip dps drop by a good ammount.
Puncture spam with Falcon Strikes (lotsa bleed) and Dive Bomb (consumes bleed, triggering all the damage and doing multiplicative damage per stack) on CD (no interruption to puncturing with the Intuitive Connection node), smoke bomb as a cooldown for bosses and survival, aerial assault for traversal (with bleed from caltrops, but it's not bleeding enough to warrant using except to dodge stuff).
Like my curse/melee warlock, she blitzed through the back half of the campaign--from what I can tell, she has even more DPS than my warlock did at this point but is a bit squishier (investing a ton of nodes for a mediocre amount of glancing blow and dodge feels pretty underwhelming compared to warlock getting tons of ward gen+less damage per curse+15% damage reduction curse etc). Burned the last campaign boss so fast she couldn't heal herself in phase 2.
AFAIK bleed falconer and warlock in general are both really good, so maybe I'll see how I feel playing something a bit less exciting next.
I have a few others I've played a decent amount. A sword+shield flurry+lethal mirage bladedancer, chaos bolts warlock, a necro build that harvests for a 'death knight' sorta feel...plus like 5 other ideas I've barely touched or not made yet.
Enjoying my altitis for now. But also working my way through the basic monoliths on my curse harvest warlock.
you can also use Glyphs of Chaos to reroll that affix to something random, of course it may or may not be helpful ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That's also randomized on which one it changes too right?
That would explain that, yeah. Dangit.