hiya, new to the gane but ARPG veteran with 10k+ hours across other titles with majority on poe.
Can’t really afford time-wise to check and test this myself so I would be eternally greatful if you could provide me with some feedback based on your experience with the game.
Im a melee class enjoyer - I like to go fast and deal tons of damage (I don’t mind glass cannon generally but wanted to play a true melee class this time - in heavy armor and shit but needs to hit like a truck). Anyway i ve started yesterday and got my void sentinel to lvl 50 ish and started wondering if i ll be able to comfortably zoom through endgame with it - again im looking for high damage (ideally a boss killer that can ignore some mechanics because come on im melee)
I dont mind at all if i have to spend more time farming the gear and min maxing the build - this is why i love arpg afterall - I just hope that sentinel with the right amount of time invested and min maxed gear is capable of zooming around the map and dealing tons of damage endgame.
Will I be able to achieve my endgame fantasy with Sentinel? Or should I switch to bladedancer or spellblade or perhaps the fat druid guy is more the melee big dmg playstyle
Appreciate all the comments, love the game and the community so far.
Big thing to note. This is likely not to happen. LE is a bit different from other aRPGs in that most end game bosses have mechanics you HAVE to avoid, not ignore. It’s very specifically designed that way so you can’t just have your cake and eat it too. So I’d recommend tempering this expectation a good bit.
That said, there are plenty of viable melee builds for endgame. Since you’ve already gone VK, you might have a perusal of Last Epoch tools build section. Last Epoch Builds VK Builds.
If you don’t mind considering other avenues, those sections can be tailored to look at other classes as well and many of the detail guides are terrific and have videos that demonstrate not just the playstyle itself but active engagements with many end game bosses.
With the artifical boss damage reduction in place you don’t hit like a truck. Heavy armor and melee sounds like Sentinel is the one for you while each class has some kind of heavier armor.
On the other hand Druid as Werebeasr deals good dmg same goes for the bug form.
You won’t achive a bosskiller that can ignore boss phases because the game is designed in a way where you have to suffer trhough most. You can simply google for Jura tier 4 fast kills and play those builds. @boardman21 has a ton of guides up and running and a big collection of leveling guides for classes as well. You might want to look those up.
At the end you can make almost everything viable ass long as you have at least one damaging skill on your skillbar.
I’m boss. After working in the woods all day, when I come back, I’ve got some natural damage reduction because my smell prevents anyone from getting within a stone’s throw of me.
Maybe we could get the DR that happens with bosses at first instance to reflect this. “Lagon has a powerful fishy smell from spending too much time at the bottom of the Great Ocean and it makes it more difficult to land blows until you adapt.”
Do I have to? The system that is in place for years that makes it impossible to oneshot bosses or to kill them as fast as we could because the devs thought it’ll be a good thing to give them a tupid ammount of DR.
I’m not saying the current way of dealing with “excessively high dps builds” is the best way, but do you think it’s that unreasonable for the devs to want us to be able to experience the boss mechanics rather than delete them in a few seconds?
It’s a constant battle between the players figuring out how to make the most of the tools the devs give us (& abuse stuff in some cases) & the devs trying to give us content/boss mechanics/battles that are interesting without fucking over the lower end of the build dps pool by just making the bosses massive bullet sponges (ie, incredibly high hp/damage mitigation in all situations).
More DPS is always going to kill the boss faster, even with the current adaptive DR. It’s just not fast enough for some people (which I get).
I think it’s unreasonable for the devs to do a bad job and to unable to balance their game that makes it nesessary to put in such a stupid mechanic. If our chars should destroy and enemy in a splitsecond then so be it. I have a obvious reasonable solution for this: Balnce the darn game for once.
It’s bad design. if the devs introduce tool after to tool to destroy the game with ease they made their own mess. The bandaid fix they used to compansate this was a joke when introduced and still stays a joke today. A mechanic to counteract the powercreep introduced by the devs… Where I’m from we call this “Verschlimmbessern” and to my knowledge english speaking people call it killing the patient with the cure.
All this mechanic does is making the meta smaller and smaller because all people want are the fastest kill times. There are no less effective but fun builds because you screw yourself over if you play a “fun build” that isn’t meta and not working by the systems the devs have put into the game.
Right now I play Diablo 4 Season 2 and I grinded my butt of to get the right gear so i can oneshot bosses. This took a fair amount of timing while running down content that get’s boring equaly fast as the monolith. After almost 100h I was there and had some fun with it untill it was silly. There has to be a middle ground and I still think it’s proper balancing und unfucking a game then to keep bandaid fixes everywhere.
In LE things are rather “easy”: Just give some love to underperforming classes and cut back the potency of “I run 1k+ corruption with ease!” builds. If all builds are in a 0%-20% effectiveness spectrum there are no needs for bandaids anymore and we see bossmechanics in the beginn but when we get strong we are strong and have a proper powerfantasy.
I was unhappy with this setup back then and I’m unhappy with it today and even after all this time I can’t point on a melee class someone asks for and say “There you go there is your big D dmg!” because that sad excuse of a game mechanic is in place.
It’s easy I get it. It get’s the job done yes. It isn’t nice but it works. Well it’s 2023 and I’m 100% sure there are better ways to handle this then giving the bosses more damage reduction to counteract what everyone want’s from a Hack and Slash game: Keep progressing and becomeing stronger and stronger with levels, gear, experience and skill.
Look at the real heavy hitting skills we have ingame and tell me why it’s logical they have the worst time on bosses. This is so flawed when an attack that should chunk 10% boss HP away is hitting for 1% boss HP. Sure this is overexaggerated so don’t start there you get what I want to say ^^.
No friend thats core of an ARPG. Even D4 allows this, being able to delete a boss eventually doesnt mean your game is a failure…infact far far from it in an APRG
You can go the PoE route and make all non-uber bosses fairly easy if you are geared and make Uber bosses somewhat ridiculous (Uber Exarch ball phase) that even certain builds cant delete them ever…some can but you still need to play the game and still get one shot with 90% resistance
In S2 in D4 I played Stormclaw Druid and can kill Uber Duriel in about 20-25s when at first it was a 2 minute+ kill. either way it was no challenge
Yeah Smelters Wrath is the perfect example: (this was from 2 years ago, just a rough example)
You start the fight and charge and do 20-25%? of the bosses hp in 1 hit from an autocrit
You charge fully and do another 9% of the bosses hp
You charge fully and do another 5% of the bosses hp
You charge fully and do another 3% of the bosses hp
You charge fully and do another 1% of the bosses hp until the end of the fight. You may as well be doing anything at this point as it doesnt really matter. Even Rive with no skilltree would do more damage than Smelters fully charged hit
Actually, yes. I’m not a huge fan of this cock-block balancing technique. One of the big attractions to games such as this is the ability to, ultimately, grow to an absurd level of power. Games that artificially constrain that power with hard-coded boss phases, or anti one-shot mechanics kind of go against that. If you let your players achieve those levels, through non-exploitative means, then having these sorts of “oh no you don’t” mechanics is a poor design.
