I came back to LE to try out the new chapter as a Sentinel.
I build my chars on the tanky side, i pump res and life, put a lot of passives into tank and damage/crit stats come after these
What i noticed is that as soon as lv10 i was getting burst left and right, i had to start spamming life on gear asap.
There is not much you can do at level 10-30 you can put these handful of passives and basically the only crafts are life and maybe resists. And go around with junk gear sometimes you wont catch the good base for 5 levels until you even unlock the next tier
The fashion continued well into lv40ish iirc, by that time i had 400life and 200-400ish resists.
The āiceā mobs were almost unbearable when there were enough to have a perma āsnowstormā spam, which was a guaranteed death if i didnt move instantly.
In the end i didnt bother with ending the chapter and went to monolith, well guess what oneshots and bursts were the same.
I dont know but i feel like the game is already powercreeping, probably those classes that are getting all the new fancy skills have 0 issues, but as a Sentinel/VK there is nothing to do here, at lv40 youāre probably going around with random junk, instead i was forced to start crafting life & res at lv10 before the crafting bench was even introduced and it was āenoughā to not get instashot but nothing more than that.
Maybe it is time that you have a look at your damage numbers compared to what a leveling char does have available
What kind of build are you playing? I feel like Iāve never experienced the amount of difficulty when I play a new character. Iāve never thought, while leveling and maybe before the 40s or so that I needed to do any kind of specific defense building at all on a character.
Iāve not played a VK, though I have heard that they are certainly on the squishier side (to make up for being high dps), so maybe thatās part of the issue?
At any rate. I will also say that in my experience Life is a fairly inefficient stat to put on gear. This isnāt PoE where Life is king (unless ES, but whatever). Armor and Protections give you more bang for your buck.
If you get damaged a lot before act 7 or 8 itās not a game issue sorry. 100 void and necro protection or even more and you are good to go and on top of that most enemys are 2 or 3 shot.
Here are my stats unbuffed at lv54 in this patch. From my pov the damage in this patch is overtuned with sudden bursts that take it down without much counterplay, take it as a feedback from a player.
When you are level 10-15 with like 10 pts total in the tree, zero crafts and one hit from a mob fire skill destroys half your life and there are 3+ mobs firing that skill, and this goes on until the last available chapter with the yellow mobs spamming icestorms, my feedback is that it is overtuned
I get having trouble around lv 40 bcoz thats when you go back to divine era and those fire and ice mobs are definitely very strong and most players that thereās a huge difficulty spike in that era
But i am surprised you are having difficulty at around lv 10, i just created a new mage character and had zero difficulties till mastery quest and this was despite me messing around.
My first proper char was a VK and i remember being deathless till mastery quest.
I started playing in the 7.8 update so i am not sure whats the difference compared to previous patches.
You seem to be am experienced so i m surprised u r having difficulty, maybe thereās some bug or a glitch???
I did craft i was forced to craft, without life on all gear you kinda risk dieing at every hard-ish mob. But put yourself in the pants of a beginner with an empty stash (unlike my case) one rando player aint going very far with this kind of damage
When i first started LE, iirc before the chapter with the undead emperor the things that gave me trouble were in the forge the void explosions on death iirc, and then the necrotic beams. I was real beginner without crafting anything, it was a surprise that i got blasted very early tho but it was manageable.
The fire bird thingies when first introduced dealt also massive damage but got tuned down in the next patch.
This patch same char same build it was the first time it started to annoy me especially when i realized i was actually crafting to survive oneshots, something that didnt happen before and i went full random in the previous patches.
What wrecked my char especially are the spiders spamming lightning explosions and these icestorms, i went to search in my captures i got a couple screens and a vid:
Two spiders casting the orb = dead
MIND YOU this is when i killed the last of two bosses, i died like 20 times here from an icestorm spam, i think i had to bait the melee boss half map away and then got back to the mage to carefully chip it (and still died hence i started recording this mess but managed to kill it in the same vid). It was 700ish life and 100-200 unbuffed ice, ice could have been higher but did i really need to craft max ice res for that encounter in a leveling area?
