My wife and I played this quite a bit at launch and left after around level 71. We’re jonesing for a new ARPG and are thinking of coming back to LE after playing PoE and D4 to death. I know about the new Cycle on April 2 so in anticipation of that, I’m thinking we should get back in now and re-familiarize ourselves with the mechanics, etc. Is this is a good idea or are things changing enough that we should just wait and re-learn everything new on April 2?
Also, if we do start now, we would each like to play a solid build that can handle the current endgame without much frustration. I’ll experiment and stumble when the new Cycle starts, but for now I’d like my wife and I to have S Tier builds. Any recommendations?
Thanks for any insights or suggestions! Looking forward to April 2.
Afaik there is no other season start on early april so you’ll lose nothing looking into it. I guess the changes they announced are enough for average players to have a lot more to do. If you two are blasters or look for some deep changes in the endgame then not “much” changed.
S tier builds… hard to say. There are some changes to the sentinel classes and skills so they might end up ahead. Warlocks were strong and if EHG sticks to the balance patterns of the past Warlocks will stay strong anyway. Rogues got a new skill called heartseeker and we all know how broken and bugged new skills can be. You can make every class work and with mastery respeccs available you just need to descide on the baseclass you want to play.
Outside of this there are enough build guides arround everywhere and I guess Maxroll will dish out builds rather fast.
I can’t associate lvl71 with “current endgame content”. So
Do you want to continue current characters (masteries) ? Right now they should be in Legacy, stash transferring is required and they are ready to go further as all new S2 content will be added in Legacy too
Or no plans to jump in until April 2?
Rather than focusing on whatever is called S-tier at the moment, I would recommend you pick according to playstyle.
Some S-tier builds rely on killing the enemy before it kills you. This playstyle is often very chaotic, it requires you to be constantly moving and paying attention to the game, to cooldowns, to status effects.
This is in contrast to other builds, where the playstyle is very relaxed - you don’t need to track cooldowns or use your abilities in a precise combo, you don’t need to avoid getting hit, etc.
For example, Glacier Sorcerer is a relaxed S-tier build. You mostly use just one skill - Glacier, and once in a while you cast a Frost Wall. You can use some other skills like Ice Barrage or Arcane Ascendance, but if you want to chill, you can simply not use them and it’s not a problem. With big amounts of Ward, you can also take hits and survive.
Things will probably change a lot in the endgame part. Especially the deep endgame part. I don’t see that it will hurt to refamiliarize yourself with the game anyway.
There are many builds that can handle all endgame. The only hurdle you might have is Aberroth, which not every build can do comfortably.
If you don’t care about Aberroth (he will be rebalanced anyway and a new Uber Aby will come along) then any build that can do 300-ish is good enough, so like Psojed said, you should instead focus on your preferred playstyle, since you’ll find great builds for all playstyles that can do endgame comfortably.
Aaron has a huge series of build guides and most of them can do 500-ish corruption. With less optimal gear, I’m guessing they do 300c easily, especially if you’re going to be playing in a group.
It even has the added bonus that his recent Sentinel build guides aren’t using Volatile Reversal (which will be totally reworked), so they should even be somewhat compatible with Season 2 changes.
That being said, there are a bunch of builds that have a really easy time of it. Warlock with chtonic fissure, sorc with frost claw/static orb, falconer with dive bomb, shaman with storm totems, spellblade with shatter strike, etc.
Most of them will likely be nerfed in some way with Season 2.
We are mixed. I like effective, even if complex, builds that do what they do extremely well. I can animation cancel with the best of them, and love synergistic combos My wife prefers a more simple button pushing rotation. That said, I do also enjoy a relaxed easy playstyle if it meets the efficacy threshold. In D4, for example, I enjoyed both Rain of Arrows and Death Trap, some of the most highly damaging builds in the game, yet simple, 2-button controls.
I’ve found that FrozenSentinel’s Frost Claw/ Static Orb build is fun, powerful and pretty easy to play. Also, most of the gear is fairly flexable in terms of affixes needed to make it powerful.
Voaltile Reversal got reworked. A majority of Sentinel Builds (from all 3 Masteries) used it and gained a lot of power from it. To make up for it almost all skills received buffs. and Paladin and Void Knight got a passive tree overhaul (both of the trees were very old). FG got some minor updates as well to the passive tree includign a new node that lets you wield a 2H Weapon together with a Shield.
IIRC Sigil of Hope also got a overhaul/update to make it less tedious, I don’t think they revealed the details about that.
So overall I think its all buffs, with some exceptions maybe. But most importantly and that will be the goal of many of the Class Updates: Give us more viable options and alternatives. So we are not forced into specific skills or synergies, because they are so good and outweigh other options.
Frostclaw builds, either Sorcerer or Runemaster, is a very easy and strong build right now. Continue spamming Frostclaw so it can shoot a ridiculous amount of projectiles and delete mobs like nothing. And while spamming the projectiles, your ward goes up like crazy so it has ridiculous defense.
