What games are you playing right now? Anything you'd recommend?

[SvennoJ]

Mummelmann said:

SvennoJ said:

Wow, we suck lol. We never see anything better than 80-120 dmg weapons drop in tier 3 maps. How the heck do you craft a 386-520 mace :o I'm happy to see double digit stats on things that drop, so often it's +6, +2, +8, insulting lol.

My resistances are in the 30s :/, my wife in the 40s with fire at 75. Chaos in the 20s.

We do have life on kill as well from the passives. With Herald of Ice and Herald of Ash the packs are healing potions basically. I freeze them, my wife leap slams into them, pack gone. What saves us is the near instant freeze my monk can do on just about anything, freeze and jump to the next.

We put boneshatter in the ancestral totem, but she only has one totem and it just takes too long to set up. Freeze + leap slam or fire balls is our way to clear zones. Trow a hammer on a mini boss if there is enough time before they melt lol. We could easily do higher lvl maps (instead of fighting 67 at 75) but any lucky shot by the rng and one of us is dead. Especially poison and those purple things that chase you. Chaos resistance needed, hard to find.

Maybe it will go better now with a few ascendancy points.

I pick up good base items and slam them with Orb of Alchemy, it's a bit of a gamble, but I got lucky. Then you add Blacksmith's Whetstone to the mix, upping the quality of the item, and significantly increasing the damage along the way. Lastly, add two sockets and put in two runes with 20% Physical Damage. You can often more or less double the base damage this route alone. I traded one Divine Orb for over 300 Orb of Alchemy (at the Currency Exchange available from Cruel difficulty on) and I've tried with a lot of items, some turned out pretty good. It's a game of both time and chance. 

The balance of resistances is always tough in ARPGs, they almost always follow a linear system where increased difficulty incurs penalties on flat resistance. I try to get high values on a few items rather than medium/low values on many, that way, I'm not as dependent single pieces of gear.

The Ancestral Totems work best with semi-ranged AoE attacks. If you place them at choke-points as well, they can tear up packs in no time. As they scale with Melee Skill level and Melee damage, they can get pretty strong even without lots of nodes in them.

My main issue now is lack of Strength; if I want to progress to the next couple of tiers of weapons to increase DPS, I need over 600 Strength due to triple demands from Giant's Blood. That is, if I want to keep the shield and not become squishy again. Having some left over Spirit on my current setup, I also added a Skeleton Warrior minion. He's just there to draw enemies while I slap them across their heads though, he does no damage to speak of.

Along with Hammer of the Gods, my Titan is surprisingly efficient for bossing as well. The infamous Viper boss (asshole surrounded by soldiers, using them to poke you full of holes in one phase) fell in the first phase under an explosion of physical damage from the Totems, Hammer of the Gods, and my Hammer of the Smack at once. Not even my Monk was as fast in taking her down on my first play-through. I'm a bit stuck right now though; upping the Tier of maps will increase difficulty by quite a bit, especially with modifiers, Breach etc. I can only get incremental upgrades that don't do all that much. Looking to score higher Block first and foremost, and increase Strength for availability of weapons, as well as more Health.

Yeah got all that. I posted this in the wrong thread last night:

Our main weapons, my wife still playing with a Mace from lvl 35, not found nor able to craft anything better since.
(I do a quick check for dmg stats on things that drops adding 40% extra still under, and when it's close the speed stat makes the difference)


So from lvl 35, selling over 2 million in loot since, nothing better lol.

I got 'lucky' with my staff from scouring the shops. It never dropped but was available in the shop one day and an exalted orb added the speed modifier. Yet that was an exception. The ranges on stuff from the shops we get in the end game are never any good doh.

We got one divine orb, I tried it on a potential item and nothing changed lol. But good tip trying orbs of alchemy on white items, just got to find a good base item first! It's a long and boring process, not fun when you're waiting to play together. Same as buying random items over and over. It has worked to get my wife some better stats, spending millions of useless gold buying random items in end game shelter.
Anyway when we finally find something, got stacks of armor scraps, wetstones and exalted orbs to improve them further!

This is where our characters are

I guess we can sacrifice some life for gear with better resistances. But it has to be at least 2 high resistances per piece now to make a difference. I also kinda handicapped myself with a orange hat. The stats aren't all that good but it has 100% ignite on anything in range that we have built our strategy on. Stacking extra damage on mobs affected with ailments and those on fire since everything always is.

This is me wandering around the tree

Left turn to the Sorcerer's abilities.

I had to turn off Glacial Cascade again as my str is only high enough for 9 quarterstaff skills.

My main attack is Ice Strike, I always use that while leeching mana to keep it going or upping it with the mana flasks. Then shattering palm for stuns. When a mini boss lasts for more than a 2 seconds I can place Tempest Bell but most melt too fast to bother. Much less useful now as in the main game where tempest bell became the main dmg dealer in most fights. (Still looks call when we're both hitting it lol)

I have a lvl 16 chaos dmg wand as backup, rarely use it, does so little dmg. My wife simply chucks molten blast at them, it was at over 3100 dps before the patch removed that info. My wands are all in the hundreds of dps :/

And of course charged staff which is pretty much always available with combat frenzy. So easy to freeze mobs, just takes 2 seconds to get 3 power charges. I removed whirling Assault as it just got me killed. Was useful in the main game to quickly blind a group of mobs but it now leaves me too vulnerable to dmg and it's faster to kill them now. Same for Hand of Chayula, removed as paying attention to the counter got me killed more than I ever saw it contribute much to the dmg. Just hit the bell when a mini boss takes longer than 1-2 seconds.

I added Ice Nova and Frost Strike from the sorceror's tab to fill up my buttons. More priming for freezing and just something to have to pull mobs towards us instead of jumping in. Not any real dmg nor life savers. More ice on screen!

And last Ghost Dance and Herald of Ice. Ghost Dance just added now I have more spirit from the ascendency, dunno yet if it's effective. Not enough dex for the better version!