This season has been a banger so far EHG and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my playtime so far. However, I believe there is a significant issue with certain classes survivability at endgame with the current corruption scaling or class defensive balance that needs addressed.
As a Bladedancer (rogue) player, even with high investment I’m having trouble pushing 2500-3000 life. Even with 60+% dodge and a ton of leech, there are too many things one shotting at relatively low corruption (~200). Anytime there are multiple dangerous mobs on screen, it becomes almost impossible to dodge all attacks and ground effects. This is compounded with certain skills and playstyles such as Dancing Strikes, which has long animations and moves the character in imprecise ways. It also requires an attack to land every ~4 seconds to maintain the rhythm buff or damage tanks. It’s not feasible for this character to hit and run with the current design of skills. I had similar issues with a Multishot build, which requires melee range to maximize DPS. Marksman just doesnt have sufficient defensive layers to make that playstyle feel anything but clunky to play as corruption goes up. Again, this problem shows up as low as ~200 corruption. I don’t need to be able to face-tank everything, but how frequent the oneshots are for this class at low corruption with moderate defensive investment feels bad.
Seeing videos of things like void knights playing with ~6k life pools and face-tanking Aberroth while pumping damage, it’s clear that something needs done to improve the survivability of other classes.
Suggestion: post a link to your build on lastepochtools.com. You can import your character from the servers or a save file. That way someone will gladly take a look and help you.
There are videos of Rogues clearing higher corruption and defeating bosses, so if others can perform what you have issues with, then most likely it isn’t an issue with the class lacking something, but rather your build lacking something.
As for Health, it always comes down to investment. You can do a quick check. There are 6 health affixes:
This is just on your gear. You can have up to 22 gear affix slots allocated into health. How many do you have? In the link from Llama8, I can see 7, and some of those aren’t even T5.
You’re also quite heavy on the uniques. If you could switch a few affixes out, your resists would drop a small amount but you’d get an additional 1k hp. Plus you may wish to swap your weapons to the other slots so you get some parry chance & unless you’re blinding everything, you may wish to get either capped crit avoidance or more crit damage reduction.
Sentinel is FOTM much like, say, Lightning Spear Sorc was in one of the Diablo4 seasons.
I guess that after the season ends, he’ll be nerfed, and some other class/mastery will be buffed to FOTM status by the developers to promote “something fresh”.
This is a common strategy used by developers to shake up meta, invite people to return for another season and try something new. There’s an additional bonus for MTX heavy games: you’re likely to try a new class and skillset, and you probably didn’t buy any MTX for it, so you’re more likely to purchase it for a different class than you’ve already played.
This is very deliberate and has nothing to do with incompetence of the balance team. It’s a business decision.
If you like Rogues, I’m pretty sure they’ll become FOTM eventually.
As for your character, you simply lack defenses. Your EHP is low.
Even my crappy Sentinel with ~1200 HP has around twice your EHP if we factor in the effects from five sigils (they don’t show up on the character screen unfortunately).
Maybe. But since it’s a common tactic for modern ARPGs to shake the meta, I’m inclined to believe we’re going to see the “FOTM” class/build each season.
Dodge on its own is a terrible defensive stat. Dodge should never be your primary defensive mechanism, because it is random and extremely volatile. You either take 0 damage or you take the full amount of damage. You need to try and incorporate armor (not nearly as much as a strength build but atleast some) and possibly look for ways to max out your glancing blow chance to 100% (35% damage reduction) while also focusing on health and capping your endurance to 60% for surviving those bigger hits.
The Rogue is a high skill-based build, not a gear-based one. The demands for the rogue are to avoid every single high-skill damage potentially one-shotting, which can be done but is not in the ability of everyone.
In comparison a Void Knight or Forge Guard actively will be able to just tank through it no problem, the same things killing a Rogue will be a laughably easy situation.
This is not a build-issue but a general balancing issue provided. An acceptable one, albeit should come with the notion that this will be the playstyle to be expected likely.
It especially comes from the lack of armor as well as the primary defensive measure being dodge. First of all, dodge does nothing against DoTs, armor can reduce it through Affixes. Scaling armor is nigh impossible with the complete class as even the highest bases provide only a fraction of it comparatively. This makes the baseline experience a lot harder.
Defensive measures in-built into the tree also work around not getting damaged rather then reducing said damage. I have experienced the exact same issues with my rogue build. Top-tier damage, defenses are crap though in comparison. You’re an off-tank, you kill stuff before it can kill you.
@Glueyman As for the build itself though which can be improved to alleviate these inherent downsides, so things you can personally do:
The T6 on the helmet is offensive, a very good affix but not making up for lost defensive measures. Getting crit reduction on a rare helmet with health is a more tanky option, at the cost of damage. Still something I would heavily recommend.
Communion of the erased has been a really lucky one for you with the % health. % armor also makes good work of alleviating the low armor downside of the class potentially, albeit you don’t have much to scale it from yet, it’s a good item for the future but not doing much for you at the moment.
Remove ‘fighting chance’ as you’re already having defense issues, 9% more damage taken is a death sentence. A really good offensive item but not worth it because of that downside. Getting one with health + crit reduction is great.
The absolutely most important modifier there for you will be though armor + armor applies to DoTs, DoTs have the most deadly attacks in the game currently, so it’s easing up on dangerous situations substantially if even a fraction of your armor applies. 5% are already a huge deal.
Stealth is a great unique boot, I still recommend removing it though for the moment. Not only are you missing out on a higher movement speed affix which will be able to get you out of dangerous situations easier, but also once more a source of crit reduction and hybrid health.
For idols, generally they are a great source of vitality and health, defenses are better situated in the blessings (as those are very powerful tools there) and only when you progress beyond and can allocate it through gear using them for offensive methods. he exception of that is the elemental resistance ones.
Individual blessings are worse then elemental resistance on gear generally, that stat allocates triple its value after all and should hence be prioritized there. The lightning res you got allocated would be good to get into mana instead if you have any issues there, otherwise one which is a bit ‘out there’… stun. Stun is often overlooked as a defensive measure but does really well in LE, allowing to focus more on hard hitting singular enemies and avoiding their attacks rather then with mediocre hitting enemies. Also it tends to stop stunable enemies which have high damage attacks that happen fast.
But the most important bit (which is basically mandatory): 100% crit avoidance or as close as possible to 100% crit reduction. Reduction is especially good since it’s a hybrid between that and armor.
Edit: And since I completely forgot in my oversharing there:
Endurance. Capping endurance is basically a must have for a health build, nearly as important as crit reduction.
It’s a hybrid of both. Meta-shifting is intentional. Balancing issues aren’t.
And EHG is fairly prone to balancing issues… not much need for meta shifting as that already does that more severely then doing it intentionally
Ok, so… what Affixes do you give up for it to include Armor and % Armor then? Is it health? Is it res?
With Strength the same… it’s the core place to raise the power of your skills, Attributes are quite powerful.
I always find it really funny how people go ahead and say ‘but you can!’ while absolutely ignoring that it comes with distinct downsides lowering the overall power of your build which makes it even less possible to survive in higher content at total.
What I’m talking about here is core class balancing. It’s the same situation happening in PoE with archer classes. They’re glass-cannons which can’t do top-end content reliably because they can’t survive as easily compared to a magic based class (Energy Shield, LE equivalent being Ward) or more melee focused classes (Armor). Mind you… PoE 1 where physical damage actually is the most deadly damage available in general end-game outside of specific bosses
In LE we simply have the aspect that Armor is a flat damage reduction for all possible damage in the game. Be it physical, others or even DoT with the proper setup. Flat reduction of damage is the strongest defensive measure in a looter ARPG, after all it’s non-specialized on a specific situation, it always applies and always the same.
So if you make a class which has a ‘I get not hit or hit in full’ versus a class which has ‘I get always hit but far weaker’ then the question of which is better is obvious, the one which gets hit but weaker.
Why? Because it’s reliable and stable. You get situations where you’re getting hit several times… or got heavy damage incoming at once. If you reduce it then you survive. If you roll the dice if you get it or not but without reduction you have a chance to die.
It’s a simple base aspect.
And unlike in PoE where you can potentially lean into anything (to a degree, and still there’s issues existing) in LE you can’t. You got different bases per class. A Sentinel chest armor and helmet are vastly superior in armor then a mage or rogue one. Mage has Ward options though to alleviate it… Rogue only has avoidance. It’s the ages old conundrum of dodge/evasion/whatever you wanna call it. It’s a ‘all or nothing’ situation simply.
Mage has alternative ways to increase EHP. But a Rogue generally has low EHP.
For most classes you don’t have to sacrifice anything to increase base HP - upon which you can scale into EHP numbers - accordingly. You either have in-built methods to increase the scaling directly (Extra Armor, flat reduction and so on) or you have ways to severaly increase the base HP pool (High amounts of health/vitality or ward generation). With a rogue you’re missing that though, to achieve that you need to actively sacrifice offensive measures which are roughly balanced like the other classes though, not taking well into consideration that to make up for the inherent weakness of defense you need to give up on the offensive stats otherwise.
Obviously that leads to a built-style hence which is highly skill-based. Glass-cannons… massive offensive power and defenses can be anything basically since you’re trying to not get hit at all best case. You take what you can get but you focus on dishing out so much damage instead that you just barely manage to scrape by when dangerous situations happen… not by dishing out and taking damage but by trying to avoid it entirely to not get one-shot.
That’s why we see a boatload of people in 1000+ corruption settings with rogues and shit builds worse then what we see with OP… and others struggle at 200+.
It’s a highly skill-based class in comparison to others.
I mean… just look at the spread of mitigative or EHP defensive options on the passive tree, it says it all! i’m including attributes directly into the defenses btw.
Primalist base access:
329 health
10% health
90 res
86% armor
105 armor
24% endurance
64 endurance threshold
Aspect of Boar (15% flat mitigation after melee hit)
2% ward retention
Mage basic access:
304 health
96% res
126% ward retention
Inscribed Instruments (72% Ward retention with Sceptre)
Mental Catalysis (Only with Catalyst, 12% ward retention + 32% less crit damage, frees a full affix slot non-exalted)
Transcendence (36 Ward/second)
Essence Duel (15 ward per melee hit)
Arcane Shield (generally always up, either -4% or -10% damage and some ward per second as well as friggin 20% armor per stack if you take the lower flat reduction, limited to 80% though, massive nonetheless if invested into it.)
Arcan Warden (24 Ward per melee hit + 1 ward threshold per int)
Sun and Storm with Silver Rune (Up to 70 Ward per second gain)
Potentially Lost Knowledge
Potentially Reactive Ward (if the initial hit doesn’t kill you and it’s a multi-hit potential death)
Loads of situational stuff for Mage overall. High-build-reliant.
Sentinel base access:
525 health
10% health
341% res
66% armor
60% armor when hit (in 4 seconds)
5% MORE armor
593 armor
20% endurance
10% flat damage mitigation
9% block chance
1050 block effectiveness
Rallying Block (up to +1200 armor, mostly less)
Block is included because it still is a mitigation mechanic, even if maxed at 85%, hence unreliable.
Sentinal is insance as a baseline defense class as we can see, completely outperforming.
Acolyte base access:
318 health
100% res
177% ward retention
35 ward/second
240 armor
Soul Barrier (wow… 90 ward at half-life, what a boon! Shittiest passive in the game defensive wise, even with Life Barrier)
Soul Drinker (potentially, but very situational)
Wisp Weaver (kinda ‘eh’ though unless you play wraiths)
No options to deal with Death Seal is why Lich as a class is a mess and doesn’t really function well… unless you focus on skills outside of the class… which is kinda counter-intuitive though.
Rogue base access:
264 health
40% res
35% critical strike avoidance (bad stat since it’s only useful at 100% and comes together with dodge on gear)
31% clancing blow chance (and potentially dodge exchanged into glancing blow chance)
damage taken +9% with dual wield! (who thought this up?)
Dusk shroud mechanic, 5% glancing blow per shroud. 32% chance to gain a shroud when hit. 30% on melee hit.
And that’s it.
Rogue gains less health then a friggin mage. Basically no resistances, has no armor at all in increases, no flat mitigation outside of glancing blow (which needs to have a massive focus on dodge to reach guaranteed 100% and only counts for hits… which can be mitigated by armor on other classes + exchanged into DoT reduction too) and when dual-wielding even gets a baseline 9% more modifier on damage taken, which happens before mitigation calculation.
So don’t tell me it’s a build issue. And don’t divert with ‘if you wanna have specific build advice’ passive agressive crap.
See, that’s bullshit.
Parry, Dodge, Armor, Block, Endurance, effects that make you take 0 damage and Ward are available to ALL classes, so you always get to PICK what you want, and there is no class that is forced into a chance-based defensive layer.
Well, Rogue has Rogue-specific mechanic called Silver Shroud, which is a 10 second buff that guarantees you Dodge next hit. And you can keep it up permanently. So unless you’re taking heavy hit after heavy hit, you’re good.
Flat means a number that isn’t a percentage. For example, 100 flat DR means that from X damage you would take X - 100.
Armor, and all other sources of DR provide % reduction, so what you’re actually referring to is % DR.
In LE you can too.
No. Rogue has Parry, Dodge, Armor, Block, Endurance and Ward.
Rogue also has the Rogue-specific Glancing Blow, Silver Shroud and Crimson Shroud.
Gee, I wonder why this vastly superior sentinel armor is getting replaced by unique items with inferior armor. Guess that implicit armor isn’t as important as you make it out to be.
Is ~70 HP difference supposed to be a showcase of something when 3k+ Health is the standard for endgame HP builds?
Or the 86% armor, which is 1-2 affix slots?
Or the Arcane Shield, which you described as “generally always up”, except it only activates on melee hits, therefore is UNAVAILABLE to most Mage builds?
Funny how you forgot to include all this for Rogues:
20% DR while moving
10% DR while Concentration is up
15% DR against DoT (Crimson Shroud)
15% HP as Endurance Threshold
up to 100% Dodge Rating
up to 417 Dodge Rating
up to 160 Dodge Rating when hit (in 4s)
additional Dodge Rating and Glancing Blow when hit (Dusk Shroud)
5% Block Chance with 1h weapon
2 Block Effectiveness per Dex
45 Ward per Second with a bow
Haste on Hit from passive tree
Haste after Evade from passive tree
OP’s complaint was about the difficulty of stacking HP maximum and about getting oneshot in the endgame. But if you look at the character, he has no Endurance, no Crit Immunity, no Armor, his HP stacking has so much room to be improved, and he takes extra 10% damage due to his gloves.
YOUR complaint is because you chose to ignore Dodge. Both are caused by player choices, so go ask for build advice or figure it out yourself.
Everyone will say is broken OP because glancing blows, people love to cry over rogue, it is what it is. People just hate a class that is faster than theirs, even if it comes with a heavy price. And has so many defensive measures going on. Reality glancing blows is hard to cap without some dusk shroud shenanigans and heavy investment, or forgoing dodge.
The reality: 3 bladedancers killed uberroth. 39 marksman, in the heartseeker patch. If you’re not abusing bugs in Falconeer, rogue is just not there. Rogue has been nerfed consistently over the years to the point is just a meme class for the most part. Falconeer has been nerfed in the wrong things, once the bugs are fixed, and the infinite scaling capped, probably will be unplayable too.
Every other unique in this game is for sentinel. This is a sentinel game, always has been, but this patch with the sentinel rework it is so much more evident. In the T7 1LP slamming meta, not having barely any worthy unique to step on is an issue.
With rogue you need to get all the defenses you can, all of them. Is a delicate balance of getting as many defenses as possible, while not loosing too much offensive power. Is true that, as long as you don’t get one-shotted from full health, you will almost always recover.
I have a season 1 bladedancer: 2.6k HP, full blancing blows setup with dual swords (76% glancing blows), about 50%-70% effective dodge. 60% endurance, crimson for Dots, ton of defensive stuff from dancing strikes, but 9% increased damage taken. Of course silver shroud, etc, some armor investment… At 250 corruption some hits leave me in 20% HP, which is fine because I can recover. But surely some of the new champions and the new woven stuff and some bosses can one-shot me at this corruption.
I could push the build to 400-500 corruption with some gear upgrades… And that’s it. Not much more without entering one-shot territory.
On a side note, dual wield has been a long standing issue. 9% increased global damage taken, on top of forgoing a shield, or 2h + titan heart, is insane. And it has been nerfed twice (the penalty), even so, no top end build will ever dual wield in last epoch. If, it was… I don’t know: 10% less armor, and some parry chance, or just… nothing: you’re investing a point just to enable dual wielding. I just don’t get it.
Specializing in block without using a sentinel is rarely optimal. Also as stated… unreliable defensive measure, doesn’t reach 100%, hence the same issue as dodge and parry.
Endurance scales off of high Health. The provided Health as a Rogue is atrocious compared to other classes.
Armor is not reliably available. Are you actually arguing that a Rogue can go properly into armor with the highest value on Body Armor as a basis being 255 when in comparison with a sentinel we have 700 friggin hundred?
What nonsense are you talking about?
The only reason people go into armor is because there is no alternative available, it still makes you need to put vastly more effort into the same stat to come close to a shitty crafted sentinel build in terms of armor alone.
You get to pick shit in LE, the class system is not made to pick freely, it’s made to use the stuff available and lean into… just that with rogue said stuff is simply sub-optimal.
Silvershroud is available via the Bladedancer… which is not permanently available but only triggered via reducing your life below 70%, 1 stack per point.
Doesn’t do much against one-shots since you’re squishy as hell, so that’s a ‘nope’ there. Also does still nothing against DoT since it’s not a hit.
Then we got the Marksman, which yes, we can use, with a multishot build. Such variety! A single build-direction basically scales with it, which is also basically one of the least enjoyable builds since it uses Dark Quiver, a notoriously clunky and annoying skill which is RNG to boot for usefulness during repositioning.
But yes, Dark Quiver provides up to 15% flat damage reduction, you’re 100% right! As well as potentially +5 dusk shroud stacks (without dodge conversion). All at the cost of your sanity since it tends to fail spectacularly to bring the arrows to the place you need them at the moment. It’s a prime frustration skill.
And for the Falconer… yes, there it’s good, simple as that. The reason why the falconer is a strong class, why don’t have the other 2 masteries some proper form of access to something similar? Marksman has to deal with an awful mechanic (Dark Quiver) to gain active pure defensive measures and Bladedancer is screwed anyway since you’ll commonly use 2 weapons, hence 9% more damage taken.
Fair, terminology, my bad.
You hopefully get what I mean though.
Yes, just doesn’t work.
You lean into ward with a Falconer because he produces boatloads of ward.
You lean into dark quiver with marksman since that’s your strongest defensive measure available overall, it’s stronger then a red ring but so soooo damn inconvenient.
With Bladedancer… I really don’t know where bladedancer has proper defenses. Sustain yes, mitigation and EHP? Nah.
Parry is the exact same as dodge, just that it counts as a hit. So if you don’t dodge an attack you can parry it, it’s a second measure to get through before the hit is calculated.
Armor… where? Where can you scale armor? I only know of a boss unique, which is the mountain one, specifically only accessible to Rogues. But that’s it.
Block? Where do you scale block with a rogue?
Endurance? Where do you scale that?
Ward… yes, as a falconer or a multishot build. It’s mastery-specific not free for the base class.
I’m talking specifically about base class defensive measures since classes get heavily into disparate ones in the second half of the tree.
Well then, since you say that… I wonder which ones they get replaced with. Let’s check the first 10 builds per class, shall we?
Paladin:
4 times ‘Null Portent’ 16-20% health and up to 20% less damage taken for res overcap. Gee, I wonder why one would give away some armor for that? No clue, right? Also, generic armor-piece, not class-specific, so doesn’t count for ‘class diffierences’ when the base stats of classes are different, right?
2 time ‘Wings of Argentus’ with a Warpath build. 20% less damage taken again. Also generic.
1 time ‘Titan Heart’, 15% less damage taken with a 2-handed weapon 30-40% increased health. Sure, no regen… but that’s why that build uses leech instead. Also generic
3 time Exalted and not unique (1 was rare, low build)
Really can’t explain the paladin at all, can you? I’m so… sooo surprised about those stats there. As said, %DR is king. Obviously you give the part-time king (armor) away if possible.
Void Knight:
7 exalted
1 ‘Core of the Mountain’, which is also generic armor, hence not class-specific for anyone, so nothing to account, it’s about the class differences not the shared aspects. While others can alleviate issues with it Sentinel does ascend defenses instead since the issues are already alleviated. 3 seconds damage immunity is btw. massive, endurance + attributes + increased armor too, extremely powerful chest-piece.
2 Titan Heart
Forge Guard:
2 Titan Heart
4 ‘Mantle of the Pale Ox’ redirecting up to 24% to your shields. Also generic.
4 Exalted
Ok, so, every single available unique chest does indeed have in-built %DR, or in case of the mountain immunity to damage.
The spread is:
14 exalted.
16 uniques.
Ask yourself rather why 14 builds use exalteds (yeah, 2 rares I think if you wanna discount them) rather then generically available uniques that are really powerful. It’s because DR is so amazingly strong.
Rogue instead uses:
3 Woven Flesh (High armor + 100% crit avoidance to get rid of that mess and get overall freed up affixes since you need em so direly)
2 Elecoe’s Abandon… one madlad uses that without Falconer, actual acid flask. Madlad.
1 Exsanguinous, risky move I gotta say, but interesting.
7 Titan Heart
12 Exalted
1 Core of the Mountain (wondered why not earlier with how good it is)
1 Yrun’s Wisdom (Just the casual 4 LP double rare affix build, obtainable clearly.)
1 The Kestrel… odd but interesting, screw armor completely I guess.
2 Null Portent
Total:
12 exalted
18 uniques.
Much higher spread of uniques, many non-defensive ones since ‘screw defenses, got none anyway, go into offense!’. We see a good spread of glass-cannon builds and some trying to at least alleviate the issues somewhat, mostly generic armors as well, barely any class specific ones.
So, if Sentinel scales better through the tree related to defenses as a base class (not mastery) and Rogue does get the worst result of all classes for base defenses… what do you think will happen?
Yes, people lean into glass cannons because the they’ll die anyway, so they Äfix’ that via going into ridiculous damage commonly. Heartseeker is basically prevalent.
Dunno… 60% res kinda is a T6 affix.
301% res compared to the Sentinel is kinda 4 T7 Affixes in value
Also 3k+ health because you use & increase health, which scales off of the flat one. So yes… yes 70 health is a T5 on gloves for example. Don’t underestimate that amount.
It’s a lot of difference.
Also mentioned as situational. Several skills are mentioned that way. They’re supposed to be removed.
Because I specifically mentioned mitigation and not avoidance. Crit avoidance counts as mitigation if it reaches 100%, which is why I included it. Otherwise I would’ve left it out.
I especially also stated that block is not reliable, since it can only reach 85%.
Pick out the reliable ones, some are a bit situational based on items chosen, but those are specifically mentioned with ‘on melee hit’ or ‘with a sceptre’ for a friggin reason.
Where is 20% DR while moving in the passive tree, first half of masteries?
Where is 10% DR while concentration is up?
I specifically went for class and not masteries, because masteries are supposed to built upon a class and then have distinct up- and downsides which respectively need to be taken into consideration only for them. But that should be building on the base class inherently.
Why? Because otherwise you get shit progression since one class has better access then others, and for some only end-game becomes viable while early game is shit to survive for example. And yes, everyone can currently survive early game… but that’s the fault of this mess of a balance there.
Haste also is no mitigation, it’s skill-based avoidance.
Which I pointed out and then added the issues related to the base class.
Yes, because they’re offensive glass-cannons. You can’t properly tank Uberroth (a design failure in my mind definitely, since it favors some closses this way ridiculously) and hence the cut down the fight-time instead as much as possible to reduce margin of error. Viable option! Kudos to the skill level of those people.
Absolutely. One of the most ridiculous downsides in the game.
It’s so bad it comes close to Soul Barrier
Block is a defensive mechanic that grants a chance to reduce the damage taken from hits.
Whenever you take a hit, your Block Chance is rolled to determine if you block the hit. On a successful block, a percentage of the damage is mitigated.
This percentage depends on how much Block Effectiveness you have, and the level of the area you are in. The percentage cannot exceed 85%.
The % you mitigate is capped at 85%. Block chance isn’t. So you can have 100% block chance and it will mitigate all the time, at most 85% (though usually only around 40-50% in endgame areas).
