Man, duelist sucks

Level 52 melee dualist now and haven't taken a single major damage node. All I do is fancy traveling to keystones and life nodes. But I have to say that it was fun up until now. The difficulty forces you to get creative and combine skills. Every mob I defeat I do so with elaborate trickery :-D, casting decoy totems, slowing targets down with temporal chains then whirling through the mob to eliminate the ranged attackers, recasting decoy and temporal and then cleave at the rest of the mob with live gain on hit which can keep you alive despite the massive damage. Up until now I was running on par with monster level with not too many difficulties but once I started dying things turned messy. Combat for this character is just too unforgiving. Half a second too slow: you die. You die twice: 20min of leveling down the drain. Later it's gonna be 1h or 1d. Farming turns out even worse because you kill a third of the amount of monsters/ min compared to the ranged guys. Accordingly your items aren't that good and you die even more.

And then those wonderful damage and weapon spec nodes in the dualist starting area you can't take because you need more life.

Seems like this game wasn't made for melee. It definitely wasn't made for a "walk in start cleaving" gameplay. You would need about 10K life to do that considering the amount of damage mobs can do.

I will let my char rest for now and see how the game is gonna change in the future.

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samtc escreveu:

To summarize he would like this to be Diablo 3 (I find melee there incredibly boring) where you can just stand in front of every mob and kill them all. My WW barb was so incredible hard to play.... Wait nvm it just destroyed anything in it's path without ever stopping or running out of his zerking form...I do perfectly fine as melee but you can't expect to just stand in there toe to toe forever in this game. It's not meant for the casual who wants to just kill everything with ease and no effort.

I don't know what your experience in Diablo 3 was, but my Monk had serious problems in late Act 1 and then 2. It took me weeks to progress through that thing and it was not pretty. Hitting that brick wall and feeling like progressing is impossible is not fun, that's the overwhelming feedback you get in this thread. In this case it's because the Duelist seems severely underpowered.

Am I a casual for thinking that dying to whitehits, doing your job up front is less fun than sticking your hand into a bee hive?

I don't mind dying because I missed a skillshot or failed to sidestep a frost bolt. I mind dying if the game basically says "You'll get 2 shotted if you don't take every defensive thing there is. Then you get 3 shot.". That's the one thing Diablo does better and where your analogy crumbles. Rare mob packs always expected me to keep moving with things like ice bombs, fire chains and arcane beams.

I'm in A3 Cruel currently, but after farming for a while and not simply using alchemy orbs on random garbage you are able to buy good things instead. I am lvl 51, I use 2handed swords mostly. After investing in 2 good prismatic rings and a really good 2hander I've got 1300 dps with 93% accuracy 75 to all resists (chaos still hurts) and using doublestike and cleave while positioning myself smartly I really don't have many problems.

A lot of deaths can be prevented just from watching the attack animations on mobs, like the fire skeletons they bring back their arm and throw forward so its easy to tell when they are going to attack. Also when you enter a room with them they all attack at once generally so you get "owned" because all of the skeletons just attacked you at once so run in dodge the first volley hit/stun if possible and dodge the 2nd volley when they pull their hands back. Kite mobs behind wagons and such and it'll create choke points that you can clobber them in and build up flask charges.

All of that aside duelist I'd say is for sure the weakest of the classes currently but with smart play you can progress, you just have to really stack the defensive nodes since you can still do good damage with just a few offensive ones and a good weapon.

Im now at piety in merciless lvl 66. The first try to kill her failed :). Now im trying to stack more armor and hp and also block chance. 12000 armor and 2300hp is rly not enough. Still getting 2 shottet by bosses and also not enough to tank big mob groups , anyone remember kole in merciless? :). Im feeling like a ranged now because i have to hit and run very often. Shit man , i killed kole with firetraps. The good thing is i skilled IR and US so i can get out very fast and heal up. I started 2 easy maps lvl 66 and the dmg input was fucking insane. I play selffound thats why i didnt try leap slam , maybe its going better with this skill.

The real problem with ranged compared to melee is that they can shoot mobs from very far away. U will hear if a mob is hit , so u keep the mousebutton pressed until theyre all dead.

one idea i have to balnce it make range damage increase with distance.

So skeleton archer in point blank distance will do 50% damage with arrors (so it benefits melee to get close to them and kill them) while at max range it does 200% damage so range needs to relocating and play smart rather then just spam skill button. They make one or two mistakes by not dodging arrows they are dead. This means they have to move more = less DPS = not so OP.

For us it gives us incentive to jump in and get close to those mobs so we don't take insane amount of damage even before we get close. Sure we will have to use skills to close down gaps quicker like Whirling Blades or Flicker but thats fine with me - i use it anyway.

Same could be done for Spells. They gain power the longer they travel so you really have to be carefull not to get hit by one of them at range or your are fu****.

I only leveled Renger to 8 or something like this but even that early it felt so much easier compared to when i leveled Duelist. And I bet it goes like this thruout the game.

Hitting the Wall issue:

As with most games i think all it is - IS GEAR. I am new to PoE (lots of exp from other games thougt, where gearing is one of the main objectives) and only level 47. After my recent thread where i was posting about how i wanted to stop playing duelist and some helpfull tips from other players I upgraded three pices of my gear and all of the sudden all was much easier to deal with (guess what .. i added more health :P). So i bet in later levels if I hit a wall will need to farm for a new piece of gear that will have better stats/mods and I will be able to progress thru it.

i think enemies should be able to inflict friendly fire, so if 20 enemies were on you and 5 more were shooting you, there would be a lot of damage inflicted on themselves. Especially soloing, this would make the combat more "realistic" and fun if you were in the middle of battle. Enemies could kind of "take turns" attacking so they didn't hit each other. I think it would create some interesting play styles. If you build up your chance to evade or dodge, enemies would miss you and hit their own. This could make meleeing a lot more interesting and give another option than being "tanky" and spamming potions. Just a thought.

My level 73 duelist is going onto the back burner until changes are made, been sitting in a group of ranged leeching exp and loot for the passed 15 levels or so in merciless so i don't die and lose exp.

So my lvl 45 melee duelist doomed to fail. :(

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splitnut escreveu:

i think enemies should be able to inflict friendly fire, so if 20 enemies were on you and 5 more were shooting you, there would be a lot of damage inflicted on themselves. Especially soloing, this would make the combat more "realistic" and fun if you were in the middle of battle. Enemies could kind of "take turns" attacking so they didn't hit each other. I think it would create some interesting play styles. If you build up your chance to evade or dodge, enemies would miss you and hit their own. This could make meleeing a lot more interesting and give another option than being "tanky" and spamming potions. Just a thought.

The Punishment Curse reflects damage dealt to you. Thats about the closest thing to it.

Melee AOE needs a damage buff. ASAP. Under 100% Damage Effectiveness for AOE skills is just retarded, when spells such as that overpowered Freezing Pulse annihilates everything in a safe distance.