Never go off-meta

I'm never going off-meta again.

Decided to try wolf this league. My build is decent, I'm probably in the top 1% in terms of gear. 2k life, 2.5k ES, 50% evasion, capped res, 20k lunar assault, correct support gems, 100% rarity.

I've cleared all content except T3 Simu and Uber Arbiter.

But:
- The campaign took hours longer than it would have on bow/crossbow build.
- I have to press 4 buttons to kill 1 rare. 7 to kill a boss. Meta bow/crossbow builds can function on 1 button, 2 at most.
- I can randomly die to invisible ground effects, poison or ignites from white mobs because I can't afford to go full ES and have have effectively 4 times as much HP like the meta bow/crossbow builds. It's also harder to avoid these effects because I have to be in melee range all the time.
- I move faster than other melee classes, but at about half the speed of the meta bow/crossbow builds.
- Since crafting was removed from the game, my only option to upgrade my character is to buy a new talisman. I have to buy said talisman from someone playing the meta bow builds who has farmed a few hundred divs by exploiting abyss in the time it took me to drop 5 total raw divines. Can't afford this, so progression is slowed down to a crawl, it's just not worth it to play anymore.

We should all always play exclusively the 2 good builds next league, maybe then they will make a real effort to balance classes and make things viable. Keep your expectations in check though, it's been 4 bow leagues now and it doesn't feel like that's going to change.

Never go off-meta - that's a good decision!

"

Tommo26#1554 wrote:

We should all always play exclusively the 2 good builds next league, maybe then they will make a real effort to balance classes and make things viable.

Most likely they would nerf this 2 builds too and we all will be fkd :D

"

SilverWF#6383 wrote:

Most likely they would nerf this 2 builds too and we all will be fkd :D

Probably.
And that might just be what the game needs. Crash, burn, and then be rebalanced.

I might be there with you. I posted earlier in the league I tried my own build and got soft locked in Act 3 on Viper because my single target was awful. I had to farm for skill and support gems for over 2 hours just to change my build around to progress.

I'm never playing melee or anything with subpar aoe capability until they make a lot of fundamental changes to the game

Melee will never be as good as ranged when ranged characters can attack while moving and don't have to deal with annoying monster mods and ground effects

The only way to make melee comparable to ranged is through some sort of "passive" effects tied to the archetype, like increased knockback and light stun resistance, phasing through monsters while using slams, higher base movement speed and "strikes deal splash damage" by default

And again, removing at least 50% of the modifiers that make melee inferior to ranged

If they don't do that they might as well just give up on developing the other melee weapons like swords, flails and daggers because almost no one will want to play with those

Melee will never be as good if the game punishes you constantly for getting closer to enemies

It's 100% the design choices around melee and rare mob modifiers.

You can't have melee be locked into place or only moving towards mobs and then design the mob modifiers to be mostly PBAOE or homing explosions while not allowing melee to move and attack...

GGG needs to pick one or both and change them heavily, either allow most of melee skills to move and attack (and I think even then all the PBOAE would be an issue, but less so) or rework most of the mods that are PBOAE and other AOE attacks (looking at you 4 AOE fields that only are a problem for someone in melee range...)
Also hinder/temporal bubble... could rework at least temporal bubble to work like the current curses or something and not a PBAOE, still wouldn't affect ranged much as they can just run out but it would allow more counter play.

And Wolf will still be nerfed, because its actually fun to play, even tho you need 6 active skills in combo to clear magic packs.
Oh and Warrior totally need nerfs now with talismans in the game amirite lads ? :D

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I learned this in 0.3 by trying to start sorc lol. It was actually unable to clear around act 2. I had to swap to LA deadeye which did double the damage at half the level just using gear I found on the floor (again, this was in 0.3 before the nerfs).

Once I got the deadeye into end game then I could twink out the sorc to get her unstuck.

In general I hate the concept of "league start". I'd rather just play the build I'm interested in from the get go but some classes/archetypes just can't do it. Obviously there's going to be the most efficient builds and that's fine, but I don't think it should be like "pick a meta league start or take 3x as long to do the campaign".

I also don't want it to be "Oh you want to make a caster? Well just go minions until level 65 then do a full respec". That sucks to do but it's one of the reasons I always laugh when people say the campaign is some kind of test for your character. It's really not cause 80% of players are probably playing 1 of 3 viable league starts then just swapping later.

Like it's good if there's some crazy interaction build using damage conversions and uniques and time lost gems that's only possible at the end game. I just don't think "I want to cast cold spells" should secretly be a dead end until you get very good gear because the game presents that as a very obvious path to take.