Although that is an interesting build, keep in mind that I only have the base game, so that particular one that you showed would be impossible for me to play.
To level up and do the campaign in Normal or Veteran, it doesn’t matter much what you do. Anything half reasonable will work–one handed, two handed, dual wield, ranged, melee, magic. Just keep your eye on health, energy, and resitances, and get gear with bigger numbers. Really, that is fine. Oh, try to put points into devotions that actually synergize with what you are trying to do.
The really hairy theorcrafted stuff isn’t remotely necessary until elite/ultimate and end game really.
Both a Warder and a Death Knight lend themselves to 2H melee. Also Commando’s are good. If you are looking for a 2H melee build that uses the weapon but is a caster, try a Forcewave build. Any 2H melee build needs Kraken as soon as you can reasonably afford it since it gives you a ton of boni per point.
So as planned I did Elite quite quickly and moved to Ultimate as soon as i finished Act 4. Glad I did, the Legendary drop rate on Ultimate is very good, or I’m just getting lucky.
It’s the thing I most love about GD and something I hope Last Epoch gets right. The loot on Ultimate is fantastic. It feels like I find a legendary or a blueprint every 15 or 20 minutes just in normal play, and every couple hours I find a legendary good enough for me to look at it and try to think what build I want to use it in.
I’ve now started about 20 characters to use all these legendary drops, of which maybe 2 will actually get there!
The one character I can’t seem to ever build up is a Nightblade. I usually get to around level upper 20s, upper 30s or upper 40s before I die.
Anyway, now that there’s an Oathbreaker class to synergize with, I’m going to give the Nightblade another shot. It should be a perfect combination for the Poison/Vitality damage side of the Oathbreaker. For example, you can have Righteous Fire, the default attack be converted to a poison/vitality damage attack. And the summons can lower those resists if the modifier is taken there as well. The class combination is called Dervish and hopefully I can build a hardcore Nightblade character that lasts this time.
Of course, it’s an Oathbreaker without a shield, so maybe my survivability won’t be that great.
You can absolutely play it with a shield until you get a sweet set of weapons to dual wield or if you want to play more cautious.
Dervish is good, and playing it with a shield is just fine, I’d certainly do it if it was a hardcore character.
I got to Level 18 with my Dervish in the Crucible and switched over to the campaign this morning. I always love this transition, because you go from the Crucible to a campaign where you’re initially really over-powered, and it’s a great taste of what it’s like with the character at full strength, sorta.
One thing I hadn’t really thought about with a dual wielding Dervish is that the damage conversion is to Acid, not poison. As you know, for every damage type in the game, there’s a Damage-Over-Time type. So Physical is immediate, and Internal Trauma happens over time. Fire damage is immediate, and then burn damage happens over time. Ice is immediate, frostburn happens over time. Similarly, poison is kind of immediate, and Acid happens over time. So by converting all my Physical damage (which is immediate) into Acid, I’ve converted an immediate damage into one that’s over time.
In the crucible, I was trying to figure out the most efficient way to play with that. Since my main damage type happens over time, should I just try to hit everyone once and try to move from enemy to enemy? This kind of works for some enemies, but not others. The yellow labelled enemies tend to have a lot more hit points, so I need to hit them multiple times before moving to the next enemy. It’s sort of hard to get this right. Honestly, I’d rather have all this damage immediately, so I’m currently not loving this modifier.
Still, I have to admit, all the various Nightblade attacks firing off all the time from my default attacks is pretty fun. I go around trying to acid damage everyone, and the various nightblade attacks fire off and kill everyone before the acid has a chance to kill them. Woohoo! Take that!
Edit: I was working on a shotgun oppressor: https://www.grimtools.com/calc/q2m1Yon2
It sounds like Retaliation is being nerfed in various ways. The Counterstrike ability on Soldier, and various retaliation numbers for the Oathkeeper. So it sounds like you guys were right in that retaliation was probably too strong in the current build.
Yah, could see this one coming a mile away. Crate has a very consistent history of nerfing stuff that becomes flavor of the month.
KevinC
2994
The problem I’ve always had with retaliation when I used it is that it only seemed to work on melee attacks. Spell caster type bosses wouldn’t get hurt, so they’d take me FOREVER to kill in Ultimate (since I had put so much into Retaliation instead of other damage types).
Was this changed?
No, but you could fix that with devotions/procs.
There was a patched game waiting for me when I got back from work. I guess the changes are live.
I haven’t noticed much different yet, except the big glaring obvious thing that they’ve hilariously broken the controller’s controls. Now the cursor moves in descrete moves, instead of moving like a mouse cursor. So in order to get to the “combine gems” button on the inventory to make room so you can pick up more stuff, it’s no longer practical to use the controller, basically. I have to reach over to the mouse.
This is a pretty discouraging change for those like me hoping to pick up the Xbox port of this game. If this is their idea of an improvement to the controller controls, I don’t think I trust their porting abilities anymore. Hopefully they’ll fix it again in the next patch.
Yah I just posted on the steam forum about it, it’s horrible. The controller worked just great, one of the things I loved about the game. If they don’t put in an option to disable the change, I’m done with the game. I’m not sure how stuff like that ever makes it out of QA, without at least a way to option out of it.
There’s a new 9.5MB patch up. Hopefully this is a fix.
Edit: It’s a little better, but nope, not much of a fix.
And another patch to download today.
Is it fixed? Yes it is. Nice. Looks like they switched their new “snap” movement of the cursor to the d-pad now, and the left thumbstick is once again free movement of the cursor.
Andon
3000
Whew, that was not fun. I guess I could have adjusted, but I’ve gotten used to it this way now.
Yeah, unlike Ultrazen I kept playing, but man, it was painful. I basically had to switch over to the mouse a LOT.
LeeAbe
3002
Judging by achievements I am only just getting, I never did the Ancient Grove last time I played through. I am still only at normal/vet, but Gargabol destroyed me. Nothing has really been difficult on normal at level 60. Kind of just breezing through everything so I might have been a bit too cocky. My fire resistance is maxed, but that didn’t seem to matter much. Not sure how to fix this character to make it doable either. I am guessing he has fire resistance, which is my main damage type. Not that it matters, I tried to run, but there was just too much fire damage stuff from the environment, that I couldn’t hide.
