Hello, are there any good builds (other than boardman’s forge guard full tank) that can be competitive in arena this patch?
I have hit a wall at 185 on my smite paladin and smite void knight and I don’t think there is any room to improve on the build, I am thinking to give up on this build. Are there any other builds like rive/hammers/shield throw that I should explore? I don’t really want to just go full tank because its boring and I’d rather just quit the game. Seems either give up on sentinel class or go play a gimmick that can actually compete (either something that is a supertank or has some kind of perma CC like cold sorcerer).
It seems like there are no good builds and most of the skills aren’t even viable for use because of insane mana costs (judgement, forge strike, etc).
Right now a core meta is void based attacks with supporting defense. Hammer throw and shield throw can both be tweaked to work in that type of build. I played hammer throw with with disintegrating aura and spiral for a while and liked it. I also leveled with spiral on hammers since I like the skill a lot. Shield throw gets really strong but even with an insane computer you will be sub 10 fps on it. You can try various versions but I would focus on building with what you have gear for, especially idols. 4 amazing rolled idols turn a build from wave 10 to wave 150 easily by themselves. Void Knight and Forge Guard are better than paladin right now due to the passives and how they fit into meta, so thats worth noting.
Malestan has a good explanation of the build here. I ran something similar and it was really good but my gear wasn’t great for it to move past MoF 15 so I changed to better suit my gear. I’ve thought about changing back though since I have another 15 levels since then and probably better gear.
Edit* gear wise I ran something quite different to max my defenses and didnt use the uniques. I only use Orian’s eye now for my current build and it would likely be similar for this build. You can simply craft better stuff than set and uniques in most instances.
I agree about what Nords21 said, about the gear, the new suffixes available for sentinel are quite OP, makes you almost immune to necrotic and poison.
A well crafted and rolled rare will be much more powerful than the uniques i listed, but i don’t have those cuz i play SSF and i’m broke ^^ As i say in the build, sets and most uniques listed are good only for leveling, not for end game purpose
If you want to be competitive with my build tho (wave +200 is a start), you’ll need good gear.
At the moment, i’m struggling to find good gear with high fire resistance to counter those pesky Siege Golem, i hate those dude
I respec devouring orb, lowered its DPS a bit and took Abyssal juggernaut over full dark torrent. I face tank 4-5 seige golems pre-7.8D. I haven’t tried since their buff, but I think I will get out of the way now. Otherwise the rest of their attacks are nothing, like dont even move the meter.
For reference my def with devouring orb up are : block 65%, fire and cold resist 88%, lightning 84%, poison and necrotic 49% and void is 53%. I have some gear to convert necrotic, void and poison to phys. my armor is 86%. Block reduction 2380 and elemental mitigations are all between 84 and 87%. i am not in SSF but I craft and gamble non-stop to make gear. I rarely have more than 20k gold and I am always out of shattering runes.
Edit* glancing blow is 114% and crit avoidance is 94%. And all my gear is currently fractured.
It’s pretty sad that void dmg seems the only way to go. This shows another to potent part of the game and and non void builds are in need of a buff. I realy don’t want to play a Void Paladin for example because my roleplayer sole is screaming in agony when I do so.
Personally I’m against PvP for an RPG title.
More so if it’s organized or “Competitive” PvP.
Why?
Because it brings in the need for that stupid concept which we all run to called "balance"
In a Role Playing Game, ideally you’d want a role to follow and your build should reflect your playstyle; you want to be the guy that dishes out a ton of [damage numbers here] then you play that way. But if instead you want to play a protective or supporting character you should be allowed to do so without anything or anyone taking you on par with everything else because…balance…
While I’m not overly fond of PvP either, I don’t think balance is a stupid concept. What if a minion build was able to deal significantly more dps than any other build? You could say that it doesn’t matter because I like to play melee & I can play melee & melee can successfully reach the dizzying heights of 10 timelines in monolith or 50 waves in arena compared to the minion build hitting 100 timelines or 1,000 waves in arena, and that doesn’t matter because I’m happy playing my melee build and getting the amount of loot that I get at those monolith/arena waves and it doesn’t matter that the minion build can get significantly more loot in a shorter time period at the aforementioned waves/timelines in a loot-centric aRPG, and it doesn’t matter that I get significantly few pulls of the RNG leaver to try & get rarer affixes/shards or that particular combination of affixes on an idol or piece of gear that I want to upgrade.
Balance is important to give the player choice in what & how they want to play the game (even ignoring PvP, balance is still a thing).
And let’s not kid ourselves that we’re role-playing in this game (some might, but most aren’t). aRPGs left the RP out of the G at least a good 2 decades ago (Diablo 1, quite possibly before).
Edit: What if that melee build you enjoy playing couldn’t even kill the first boss? It’s not like balance is important.
Needless to say, I’m just talking about balance within a particular role (dps, tank, healer/support). In MP those roles (as far as they exist) should also be balanced such that bringing 2 dps allows comparable achievement as 1 dps & a healer/support, or 1 dps & a tank.
Balance is also both a living thing (it changes as the game develops and as players develop & discover new things) and somthing that’s impossible to attain, there is no such thing as perfect balance.
Why are you validating your argument with Environment and monster stats in a PvP topic lol?
Any game out there regulates environment behavior and stats in accordance to player characters. There’s always a base (damage received & damage dealt check) upon any released product.
I have an issue when the mentality of “being the best” usually stemmed from those wanting to outdps anyone (especially in PvP environments more so if organized), forces this so called “balance” crap on everything in a game, repeatedly, until everything is the same. Thus, build overthrows build because of PvP balance.
Confronting ideas is good but let’s stay on topic.
Who said this was a PvP topic? The OP asked if there were any competitive Sentinel builds, given there is no MP, let along PvP in this game yet, I assumed he meant PvE.
I am (in the nicest possible way) not entirely sure what to say. Trying to balance PvP & PvE without splitting the damage/etc up into their own groups, Guild Wars 1 & 2 did this, a skill might do X damage in PvE but would be tweaked to do Y damage in PvP because the HP/resists/CC/etc available for the target are so different, as is the skill of the target.
PvE only games can have a player driven meta that seeks to exploit balance (or lack thereof) just as much as PvP games, D3 & PoE are prime examples of this. And yes, I know PoE has PvP, but I think most people would agree that it’s such a tiny section of the game that most people (including GGG) ignore it. PoE’s even worse in the respect of balance/meta because if a skill gets a small tweak downwards the forum/reddit are instantly up in arms about how it’s been nerfed into the ground, GGG might as well delete it, GGG have murdered their game & it’s going to fail, GGG have borked the build the player was using & the player wants a full refund (on a F2P game), etc. Then there’s the power that the streamers such as Mathil have in “guiding” the perceived meta by playing a particular build & showing how effective it can be.
No-one mentioned PvP until you bought it up vis-a-vis balance, implying that the existence of PvP was a primary driver of balance. I was attempting to argue that balance is almost as important in PvE as it is in PvP. Though I’d also argue that just because someone uses the term competitive doesn’t mean they mean PvP.
Feel really demotivated to play lately after my void smite build failed at 185 paladin, I even leveled a void knight and forge guard to 90 to play the same build, cannot go past 185, feels pointless, no other build to play other than full tank residentsleeper for sentinel. All the other sentinel skills are either full ass or have insane mana costs that make them basically unusable (as well as cutting down your entire skill bar to non-mana intensive skills because your main skill uses all your mana) so the entire build is bad as a whole reguardless.
Will Be uploaded today and can take your paladin above 185