I’m a new player who just started a sentinel and indeed it was really painful up until about level 15. I specced into lunge and shield charge on the sentinel and by level 16-17 it started to feel very fluid and decently strong.
My mage, by comparison, tore everything up right from the start. I ended up deciding to start another character, though, just to see more skills and because I’d specced into frostbite, then found out protection shred is apparently very underwhelming, and I didn’t want to deal with respeccing.
I really, really like the fact that mana is a hard tactical limit in this game. I always find it frustrating to deal with as an arbitrary source of gear pressure for some builds in some arpgs. The breakdown on the resource management paradigms in D3 was also one of my biggest disappointments in that game.
I have played almost every class through the story line, and imo it comes down to finding the right starting skills for every class (respec them later when you get some gear for the build you want).
A Sentinel seems way underpowered if you try make him a sword and board in the beginning, but try warpath or hammerthrow coupled with vengeance or rive and the game will change completely
A Primalist needs to focus on wolves and thorn totem (howl on autocast to make it even easier), and 3 points in the totem skills that makes it fire more projectiles. (by far the fastest and most safe build imo). Or if you wanna go a bit melee Tempest strike (with wolves) works too.
A Mage works wonders with lightning blast, but can be a bit squishy until you get Black Hole at 30. Go for ward skills and Intelligece
An Acolyte i think is good with anything hehe, but for me a tanky golem and some dot skills is the way to start.
Oh and getting into the gambling/crafting system is a huuge thing in this game, and some of the most important things to get first is things like attack speed/run speed/minion damage etc, imo dont go for stats early on.
Btw if you wanna do a spell based char with lots of flashy stuff on screen thats easy and safe to play, go for the totem shaman with cold based sabertooth/wolves/thorn totem/storm totem. I have one at 65 where all i do is cast thorn totem on side button, and storm totem on right button, and he havent died once yet
I’m confused. I’ve completed the campaign with every base class now, and in fact 2 Sorcerers, a BM, a Necro and Paladin. Currently working on Lich. I have face-rolled the campaign with everything, especially at the start. Not trying to be rude or show off, just damn puzzled.
I also want more better skill feeling, they already did some nice rework for some skill, keep going guys and don’t forget the power of sound effect too !
I think something is wrong but I don’t know what. After about 20 hours of in-game time I managed to get my forge guard to level 30 but the damage got so low it was unplayable. I couldn’t even kill trash and I was dying 10 times in each area.
I switched from a 1-hander with shield to a the highest base damage 2-hander I could get from gambling and crafted T4 melee damage and physical damage. Then I did the same thing with the relic for more % physical. I crafted strength on every piece of gear and managed to get to 43 strength. The damage was a bit better, I could just about kill the trash if I ignored the big monsters. I carried on like this until level 35 but it eventually became unplayable again.
I died 5 times to the same pack of monsters so I decided to completely respec my passives into 100% damage nodes. I managed to get up to 315% increased physical and 248% melee damage. This actually made quite a big difference, I can kill trash now at an acceptable rate using warpath, although the damage is still nothing special. Bigger monsters still give me some trouble. I have no defence whatsoever now as I’m 100% glass cannon so I’m getting one shot frequently from ranged attacks.
I don’t know how much longer I will be able to progress with this setup but I will see how it goes. One thing for sure, this is the most difficult levelling experience I’ve ever had in an ARPG. I really wanted to make a smelters wrath build with high block chance as it looked cool in a video I saw. All of the damage nodes in the forge guard tree are or throwing damage though so I don’t know if it’s going to work.
So I’ll repeat myself, what is your class, build & what skills are you using? 'Cause if you’re struggling to kill trash on a Forge Guard (granted, not the highest damage mastery out there), then something’s definitely wrong.
What skills are you using? What nodes have you chosen in the skill trees? What passives have you chosen? If you could upload screenshots to somewhere like Imgur.com, that would be most useful.
As I said before, Hammer Throw is pretty decent & available at low level. Misha’s Sentinel Guide is pretty good & explains a lot.
I had problems with the sentinel too when i started the game, and a few of my friends still have those problems, so now that i know the game i took upon a challenge to show them how easy a sentinel actually can be :
I started a Sentinel and my limitations were No crafting, No gambling, only use blue items i found off the ground with a max req level of 10. I was also limited to use 2 skills only (warpath/vengeance) so i couldnt even close targets with Lunge.
It took me a bit over 2 hours to get to level 30 this way, and at no point i felt slow or in danger at any point. (except the 2 rift dragon because of no run speed )
My weapon was a lousy blue 2h sword (22 base damage) with 7% life leach, and rest of the gear was 100% resistance gear.
The only damage passives i used was Owerwhelm, Relentless and Iron mastery, rest was defense types.
The Warpath i specced Void spiral/Unchained, and the Vengeance i did Excecutioner/Bolster
So yea imo i think youre focusing on the wrong things here as Defense/Resistance is definately king in this game (i had only 15% increased melee damage up to level 30)
Get more run speed, atleast 25-30 (any circles on the ground is mostly deadly), and run around hard hitting monsters which often has attacks in only one direction.
More Attack speed atleast 10+
Youre Resistances look fine (except necrotic ofc which need to be in the 30-40% range too)
Change the gear you have with block/melee damage%/strength, as they dont really do much for you in early game, instead focus on glancing blow/dodge/crit avoidance etc, and use a 2h (not needed, but imo the best choice early on), and life leech is very important too.
The “Time and Faith” passive in sentinel tree is a must in case you dont have it as it will let you tank tough monsters and regain mana for warpath
That’s all great advice, and I plan to do most of it, but it doesn’t explain why my damage is so low. You suggest I drop the strength from gear, but the tooltip says that strength increases the damage by 4% per point, which at 48 strength is 192% more damage.
The reason my attack speed is low is because I’m using a mace so I can benefit from mail crusher in the sentinel tree which increases damage by 120% when using a mace.
This isn’t my first character, I have 60 hours on the game playing mostly as mage. As I said I’m testing different things right now to try and figure out why my damage is so low. If I could kill things faster then I wouldn’t be getting overwhelmed by trash and dying so much.
On my mage I didn’t do any crafting until end game, I just used whatever items dropped and whatever skills looked interesting. I don’t expect to have problems levelling up a character in the early game but my experience with the sentinel has been very different.
I wasn’t really asking for help. This thread was more about giving feedback about the skills not feeling powerful in the early game, but as I progressed it’s gotten considerably worse to the point where I could barely play the character at all. I’ve respeced into as much damage as I can and it’s just about manageable now, but I think it’s pretty clear from comparing my experience to others that there’s something weird going on.
Im not saying you dont know the game, and sorry if my advice made you feel that way, but i guess im trying to say that with the right passives and skill spec any skill in this game can become OP.
I made my first sentinels with strength and %melee/physical too, but same as you I really felt something was wrong (most likely because early on high % doesnt mean much if the base is low)
Then i changed my game and went for attack speed/run speed/defensives and got as much flat +damage gear/passives/skill nodes as possible (doesnt really matter if its void/fire/physical or whatever), and now i feel seriously OP, both in survival and killing speed.
Also alot of the High Hp/Hard hitting monsters have Physical res, so a combo of different types of damage is way better early on
Could it be you ticked Masochist mode by accident for your Sentinel?? While it is true that my Sentinel/Paladin was the lowest damage dealer of the 5 classes I’ve finished the game with, it wasn’t by very much. This is mysterious.
Any class without a mass of minions to do the heavy lifting and take hits has survival issues ATM. This only applies to act 7 in some cases and act 8 mostly. Act 8 seems tuned for multiplayer IMO as you can spread around the dmg and focus.
I feel like once the missing passives for sentinel are fleshed out and they rework Def not requiring 100% Gb and 75% Dodge the classes without pets will be more survivable. Until then they are forced to max out those skills and ignore skills that would help their own specific build unless they get a super good loot drop that gives it all.
This is why difficulty levels are a good thing not a bad thing… Easy, medium, hard, stupid… Its why so many games go this route to appeal to a different set of customers… Having no difficulty levels is crazy because you out certain groups of customers and your sales tank in the long run.
I have yet to even make one level 50 yet because of the difficulty and the crazy skill resets… Also i agree the early skills on some classes are just plain bad and the fact we cannot level up more than 5 skills means most skills are just never going to be used as many are far better as a skill than most…
Why they limited us to 5-6 skills is crazy and very limited.
And those starter skills on sentinel holy bad batman…
You might be onto something there. Is there any way I can tell?
I would say that levelling my mage I did 10 times more damage than the sentinel and that was with random gear and skills, unlike the sentinel where I’ve been trying hard to optimise everything with crafting. I’m level 48 now and things have been getting easier, I’ve switched to forge strike which actually does decent damage and has AOE. This is the type of skill I was asking for in the OP, it feels really nice to use.
NO way to tell. I started a Masochist character to check and he looks the same as all the others.
You could start a new Sentinel and play it for an hour to see if it’s different. In the long run it’ll be faster as I imagine end game enemies are absolute bullet sponges on Masochist.
I think there is something in the upper right or left corner of the character sheet. I may be misremembering but i seem to recall something that indicates those choices.
EDIT: Got back to my computer and it looks like I was wrong. Can’t seem to find it. I could swear I remember seeing something that labelled these in a corner of something. They were also color coded so they stood out slightly. Don’t know what I’m remembering.
There is a way to tell if you’re in Masochist or not: while you’re in game on that character, press Esc and then open the Settings menu, and then click on the rightmost tab at the top that says Challenges. Underneath Masochist Challenge it’ll either say “Enabled” or “Disabled”. It also seems like you can revert the current character back to non-masochist mode if you press the button below that says “Disable Masochist” in that menu.
as Defense/Resistance is definately king in this game (i had only 15% increased melee damage up to level 30)