Please give reflect builds some love (mainly Sentinel)

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6

I must say that “thorn-damage” is just one of many parameters of LE mechanics, and all those parameters are passive, just numbers. You can have a lot of damage increases, health increases, dodge increases or any other BIG NUMBERS, but gameplay becomes interesting mostly because of skills - something that changes any situation. Something that effectively uses those numbers and transforms them into a result.

So if all you have is 10 buff-skills increasing your passive thorns and allowing you to stand and wait till all your enemies die… weeeeeeell… that’s really sucks. I’ve leveled one character like this in Grim Dawn - it was so boring :sleeping: (effective though).

But who says that it will be done that way? Skills may force you to attack large packs of enemies to get short bonus, sacrifice your health, move across the battlefield to build your dominance area and a lot more.

7

Yeah, D3’s Invoker’s set had a decent way of doing a more active thorns build. Using specific skills build up stacks that buffed your thorns damage & which were then applied to your skills as base damage.

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8

There are some skill based builds that would benefit from retaliation and thorns: Channeling smelters wraith with rebuke. You stand in the middle of a pack, rendered motionless channeling your skills while everything is punching the hell out of you.

I ran that build and it was very cool. But nothing for top ladder. But with maxing xxx while channeling equip it may be better. I had not the endurance to max stats on that build. Definitely more thorns damage would improve such builds a lot.

9

But did you ever use the “% of retaliation damage added to attack” mechanic? Almost every skill in the game can make use of it now (either on the skill itself or through item skill modifiers) and it’s basically a different way of boosting your attacks damage. Though, it admittedly takes a lot of very specific items (and usually high level items) to make viable. But it introduced so many crazy new builds, even if some of those were slightly ‘broken’ (in terms of damage).

10

Callizer has a point here!!
i would love to see some reflect/retaliation builds, especially on force knight or on paladin.
And what is boring to some is fun to others :wink:

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11

Yeah I thought of Smelter’s Wrath as well. It’s so satisfying to be a badass standing there and charging a powerful attack. Reflect/retaliation will definitely help.

Also it can support a zDPS/support playstyle when multiplayer eventually comes. Just focus on healing, buffing, and reflecting damage.

12

Maybe a reflct build with pet (reflct on pet) can be viable. I think I’ve seen that on some affix on my necro

13

Minion reflect builds are indeed viable because you can treat them as disposable minions. This post was mainly to address the problem with non-minion reflect build.

14

Make sense :slight_smile:

15

Completely agree, I’ve been playing around with a mage reflect/‘when hit’ that channels focus or disintegrate. I’ve seen some awesome synergies and powerful combinations come out of it, but have venom weavers that don’t ‘hit’ in arena, as well as 1-2 extra mobs in the library basically meaning the build can’t do anything against them.
%reflect doesn’t seem to do much as well, because the damage done to the player is nowhere near the hp pool of most enemy mobs. Even at near 400% reflect, I barely chip away at siege golems which tank the majority of my health in most of their abilities.

16

I remember Mike saying that there are some reflect tweaks coming with the next patch(es) on the discord.

17

The problem with the current reflect mechanic is that it is based on the damage you take after all your defensive layers.

That means the more protection you have, the lower the reflect damage because enemies do less damage to you.

You have to build on hp pool with less protections possible. This makes you very squishy. Actually this can be build on minions very well because you can scale minion hp way better than your own.

Reflect minion builds are viable.

No idea if they want to change the reflect mechanic to reflect damage before mitigation or make hp stacking more viable for that purpose.

18

Absolutely, and for mage hp stacking isn’t really an option as there is very little in the passive tree or skills to support it. I’m trying out armour and protections while channeling with leech - I can survive most things and quickly recover thanks to leech, but if nothing is proccing ‘hits’ on me, then I can retaliate and hit back to generate that leech.
%reflect needs to be pre-mitigation for sure!

19

They need to add more scaling mechanis to reflect builds.
For example scaling reflect damage with intellect.
Need to buff flat reflect affixes.
Maybe make some unics that support reflect damage.

20

the way I feel about it in its current state, reflect should just be a minion thing. when fully geared its amazing for necro, and forge guard.

21

Notwithstanding the dev’s post about not wanting thorns/AFK/(player) retaliation builds to be a thing, I’ve been thinking about this. Have you thought about using Culnivar’s Claim wand & channelling Focus as your main skill? The wand converts mana to ward when you reach full mana & if you’re using Focus, that would be fairly quick. Plus you can spec Focus to do some damage (though not as much as a few patches ago due to a bug with the lighting damage nodes) & possibly use Ice Barrage as it’s a duration skill as well.

You could then go full ward & dodge instead of hp/protections/armour & that would give you higher % retaliation hits (though if you dodge you won’t retaliate I believe).

22

That’s actually were the build began!
I legit started this with the afk gameplay in mind, and I’ve been doing a heap of testing over the past week for a concept ideas for a build. I’ll post my thoughts on culviner’s below. It’s definitely not as strong as other builds, but gimmicky to some extent. I quickly found that even though I was able to sustain around 3.5k+ ward, I still ran into the same issues of venom weavers not proc’ing hits (you need lightning aegis to use the %reflection adorned idols that go up to 100% each). Thats when I swapped over to protections and regen/healing and found the sustain was much better and could actually be a legit option for arena that would be strong but not overpowered.

I’m aware the dev’s are keen to weed out passive gameplay, but I can’t help wonder if thats the case, why are there so many retaliatory items and skills in the game?

Culviner's Focus Build idea

Culviner’s essentially converts mana regen into ward per second, except in discrete intervals. Given that you have a base 10 mana regen, you realise it’s actually pretty average as you’ll never able to get a huge amount of ward per second from it, for example the 300% increase from focus would only give you an extra 30 mana regen= ward/s.
The exception, is the desperate meditation node. This may be a bug, as the tooltip says conflicting things, but it works by giving you 4% increased mana regen per missing mana - which include negative mana. Abusing this to the max, I equipped enough items and passives for around 500 mana, and then spec into black hole for the 200 mana cost cast. When my culviner’s ticks over, I would cast black hole and then focus. This would give me around ~350 mana regen, and equivalently ward/s. Yuge.

With this in play, I looked at getting damage through 1 of the 3 adorned idol prefix’s. Cast Ele nova when hit, Cast lightning blast while you have lightning aegis when hit, and %reflect when you have lightning aegis. Each have their merits, but I found LB one to be the best as it deleted enemies easily and could proc lightning aegis itself. I also used the Gain Lightning Aegis when hit suffix on those idols.

Supporting the build I ran infinite arcane ascendance, with Acuity and Power Overload. This is definitely due a nerf, but I think it could be supplemented with arcane absorption (%spell damage when hit).
For lightning blast, you can’t run any additional mana cost, otherwise it can cancel your arcane ascendance.
Fire shield (yes, seriously) with all the retalition nodes and ele protection. Use Rahyeh’s shield and it will auto refresh without consuming a ‘cast’ from arcane ascendance.
Enchant weapon with Zap, free cost and auto recast as it wont consume a cast from arcane ascendance.
You can also run Static with all the Lightning Blast every second nodes and max charges, but it may trip out ascendance.

Liath’s signet for max GB.

Main issue, besides the venom weavers, is that every 15 levels in the arena, you will have to redo your black hole focus combo, as it doesn’t carry over from maps.

23

I much like @Heavy’s friend enjoy doing weird niche builds and trying to make them work. In all games like this I have made a thorns style build and usually its not great or only becomes great with god tier gear (but what build isn’t), but it still would be nice to be viable. It might not be as fast or efficient, but if you can’t make it viable then the stat has no use in the game other than a filler stat to make it harder to get the right affixs. One of my favorite builds was a suicide bomber build in PoE (cast on death) it was useless, but fun to make.

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24

100% agree, with enough effort everything, including every stat in the game should have some room to be viable, even if it’s super hard to make it viable.

In the current state of LE is hard to judge what is “viable” or not, as they only thing you can do to measure that is MoF and Arena, but i guess Arena is a very nice game mode for such retaliation builds^^

I also always played alot of the literally unused stuff in PoE, skills that had like <1% usage overall and having fun with them and make them almost as good and viable as other “cookie-cutter” stuff always gave me alot of joy.

Seeing people (especially in the PoE community) rage about skills XY being nerfed like 5% and it’s “unplayable” always brings a smile to my face when i made an hilarious good build with something that most people would call not viable or “useless”

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