Hey guys, I recently started playing (roughly a couple weeks ago or so) to take a break from the PoE league, and LE to my surprise kind of blew me away, despite the lack of polish in areas (which is to be completely expected in an early beta, to be fair).
This was especially refreshing for me as up until PoE, no ARPG in between D2-current really ever kept my interested, including the recent GD expansion. The setting and the bridge the skill system set between some of my more liked/played RPG’s systems of the type (it combines a lot of D2, PoE, WoW, and Rift like vibes, which was an amazing game that unfortunately the developer kind of let fall flat) is fantastic and I’m excited to see the progress the game makes leading up to release as I truly believe it has the potential to be big in the ARPG and even MMO player market, moreso than recent competitors, and especially with D4 looking to be a ways away… really good timing by the team at EHG to breach into the genre.
With that out of the way and on topic of the title, I’ve been enjoying making different endgame builds, specifically to push through later arena waves as almost every class/skill can eventually gear enough to do endless monolith and wanted to initiate some more dialogue on what people have been trying.
I mainly got curious when I looked at the ladders yesterday and noticed there were multiple 1k+ wave runs both leagues, and even a single 2k run done by a paladin (really intrigued by that, I’m assuming it was done with some combination of 100%+ glancing blow chance, respectable dodge and leech and necrotic/posion/void res and maybe warpath shenanigans? Hammer throw seems like it would fall off hard damage wise approaching 1k). If he would mind sharing that would be awesome.
Some of the things I’ve had sucess with so far include:
-Forge Guard with heavy Void Knight investment and just enough points to grab Holy Aura from paladin. It used hammer throw/lunge and aura with jugg stance, but after dying at wave ~400, I found better variations on the forums of the same type of build. Still not sure I can see it pushing up to 1k anywhere close to comfortably unless I’m missing out on a lot of potential damage.
-Lich with the melee sweep skill (I’m on mobile and for some reason can’t remember the name, reap maybe? Long weekend…) with a little investment in necro for wandering spirits. This was probably my favorite build so far and got me to my second highest wave attempt at roughly 550.
-Sorcerer. Black Hole. Meteor. Flame Shield. Teleport. Enough said, if you’ve tried the build with just a decent wand and good ward retention, it’s easy to see how/why there are so many sorcs high up the wave ladder. Defensively it’s obnoxious with teleport acting as a flame dash, infinite flame shield fireball proccer with bleeding heart and a massive ehp boost on use. Black Hole is probably the most busted skill mechanically in the game (that I’ve tried), and meteor spec’d correctly deletes high wave packs on medicore gear. It’s kind of obvious this iteration won’t make it to the live game, imo, but for those that have approached the top of the ladder or just deep into the arena, it would be interesting to see what tips or takes your version had of it.
I’m currently playing a Druid trying to come up with a way to make it comfortable past a couple hundred waves, but I’m missing a few pieces that would smooth it over, as well as Druid just not being as innately powerful as the first three specializations I tried. A buddy of mine swears by spellblade and thinks it can be pushed high, so that’s where my next project lies most likely.
Curious to hear some thoughts/ideas/success stories