As a quick backstory regarding my ARPG capabilities I’m a fairly long-term player - I’ve beaten Diablo 2 Ubers, I’ve completed all 10 acts of the PoE campaign and gotten to GR 90+ in D3 and higher with a group… As a note - I don’t say this to be arrogant or brag I just want to explain I feel fairly competent structuring builds, determining when to place survivability > damage, learning patterns, etc etc.
With that being said, is the Rogue significantly more difficult to squeeze both DPS and survive-ability out of when you’re in the Monolith of Fates? I have a level 88 Lightning-Blast Mage that was able to breeze through nearly all of the Monolith levels until 90+… or whichever Lagon popped back up at. For my Rogue I believe I have a fairly reliable keyroll with Umbral Blades / Dancing Strikes (Somewhat interchangeable, depending on if you go Shadow Daggers or Mirage Form Super-Crits), Sync. Strike, Dash Smokebomb and Mirage Blade all giving overlapping bonuses… but I just feel like my defensive options are limited to “Don’t get hit.” What stats do you recommend? Should I be pure stacking HP + Dodge, only Dodge, or treat Dodge as my “Armor” and stack resists as I would normally? I know it sounds stupid to say “Why can’t I take a hit” in the Monolith but, as of now (and I might be playing it wrong!), it feels like I am bound into an “All or Nothing” playstyle where my clear speed is not being matched by my Survival Rate.
Part of this may be a “me-ism”, as I generally despise going “luck” based build that relies on avoiding damage vs. mitigating it. Can anyone speak to the value of grabbing the node that converts dodge to Glancing Blow?
To me the Mage is the weakest and my least liked class. I also hate glass cannons and also dont like ranged builds usually
When the Rogue released I would just stack HP/Dodge which worked fine for BM/Marksman which were about level 91/94. I dont even remember leveling a Marksman much but just offscreening everything and seeing corpses.
My PC got wiped and had to restart from Majasa patch. I leveld a Necro to 95 and I died about 3 times and currently sitting at 3.5k ward / capped res / 70% CSA - its ok
I rolled a new Rogue on Saturday im level 81 now and ive been one shot more times in 2 days than the last 2 PoE leagues (6 months) but I couldnt get better gear to cap resists or stacking HP. so I did redid my Idols, got 73% GB from Apostasy and got my res up. Dodge on it own is basically garbage unless you can invest into the whole second part of Concentration tree imo now. Even 600 flat dodge is about 20% in 90 zone
But yeah Rogue can only facetank certain monsters. Rest is a hard dodge manually
Im playing Bladestorm Umbral Blades with Bleeding Heart - so I have very high sustain and Shadows heal me to full with Sync Strike, just need to avoid being one shot. People saying resist isnt as important is just wrong. 20% Necro resist was taking 400 per projectile from Wandering Eyes, with 57% Necro its more like 180… which is basically just PoE resists at that point.
but the glaring issue really is LE has much much higher one shot potential than PoE because PoE gives you huge options defensively.
I got ‘one shot’ in PoE Scourge league ONCE and I have a 100/94 character. I got one shot 2 times enterting Spirits of Fire as I only had 1.3k HP and getting clapped by Necrotic
I think you’re right - two important things I should probably clarify for my post:
Definitely have some ‘Rose-Tinted’ goggles regarding how smooth it was for the Mage… Granted, I think it was significantly easier to spike , and safer, than it is for the Rogue, but it did have issues. One big factor was that "Flame Shield / Energy Shield existed in it’s OP state back then (When it gave + All Res) which let you itemize more efficiently… so maybe not a fair comparison.
I don’t know if the LE Gods were smiling down on me or what but I kept getting upgrade after upgrade after upgrade for each gear-slot tonight. I’m guessing that it was because I crossed the ilvl threshold. Definitely feels better than the 45-65 stagnation period for sure.
Agreed, I generally do not enjoy any game that can suddenly 100-0 you without adequate time to strategize, be it an FPS like CoD, a Top-Down Twin Stick Shooter like Anvil, or an ARPG like Diablo 3’s original “Inferno” difficulty… but I do realize the difficulty in creating a challenging ARPG without scaling damage numbers.
I definitely realized your point of “Rogue can facetank only certain monsters”… as I kept dieing and taking damage I learned which to avoid (Ice Spike Elementals) and which we easy. I prefer to not have the dieing part, but again, see above.
Yeah there are some mobs in LE that hit really hard regardless and if you get clipped by them, those Profane Abominations that swing their rock around for example
The rogue has a sleeper passive in the Rogue tree I forgot the name but it gives damage reduction while moving up to 25% which helps a lot
edit: while I didnt like the Mage it was the one of tankiest builds I played. One setup I messed with was low life Ward Disintegrate and some Ward stuff I think I had up to 6.5k Ward back then (over a year ago) and could stand in Lagons spray taking about 5000ish ward and living
