Ok, so where's the fucking PRR in this bitch?  Because apparently PRR is everything for a melee now.

I went from night invulnerable at low levels to the same monsters now dropping my hitpoints by 50% if they score a hit.  I'm literally wearing the exact same equipment as I did with my pal lives, but the splash of PRR and MRR I get at low levels apparently isn't enough now.

And the fucking traps ><  With the evasion pal I didn't need to take my second rogue level till level 8, I could walk through most traps with them barely touching me.  Even with the first level rogue splash, I'm right back to what I hated most about barbs before; traps hitting you for 75% of your hitpoints to one shot killing you.  Even if they don't one shot you, if you get hit by a mob or another trap in that millisecond before you can chug a pot, you're pretty much dead.

The Guarding Bond is the only thing I'm seeing that seems to offer any real PRR but 12 pts isn't really shit, even at lower levels.

Normally I build offensively at lower levels then start filling in defenses around the mid levels when you really need it, but does that no longer work?  Should I be putting less into damage and more into building up my hitpoints?

Get this out of the way quickly

Frank wrote on Aug 31^st, 2017 at 10:44am:


Good suggestion, but well ahead of it.  My first two lives (the ones with the lowest XP requirements) took me a freaking month because I spent all my time crafting, farming, and searching the AH for the best gear.

Need to update my gear post, but you can pretty much safely assume I'm hitting the highest possible numbers at each level for...well...everything.  I'm talking about 5 or 6 pages of notes I took to prep my gear to make sure I could squeeze every last + on anything offensive and defensive.  Even at level 2 (when I thought I was going to try and solo reaper) I'm using handcrafted gear to boost everything to the highest number I can at the earliest levels.

Same with tomes.  I pretty much sold everything I could to get as many tomes as possible for my new toon.  +4 to the main melee stats and +3 to everything else, just for the hell of it.  Skill tomes are coming along slower, but I have at least +1 to almost all of the skills (whether I need them or not) and am boosting them as I find, beg, borrow, or steal the tomes.  I'm even hitting the sagas every life just to fill everything in.

The toon is only two months old, but at this point it's almost got everything my older toons have.

5 Foot Step wrote on Sep 1^st, 2017 at 10:12am:


Yeah...you don't have to tell me about that one.  That's kind of why I walked away from the game for a few years when I did.

I was actually part of the group of dedicated barb players (like, all fucking 10 of us who hadn't quit the game forever after barbs got royally fucked during the initial enhancement roll out) working together for suggestions (when the devs asked us) to un-gimp the class.

Our biggest complaint was how the core enhancements that all barbs need are spread over 3 trees and you have to unlock all 3 trees just to get the basics - which massively limits build potential because you can't just concentrate on two trees and it makes it harder to dip into your racial trees.

What we wanted was a solid core tree, then two very different and diverse trees that would allow for more unique builds.  Along with a list of other needed changes to the class (like meaningful DR again, since barb DR is so outdated it's fucking pointless to even have it), we gave them a number of really cool directions they could take the class without making it OP.

They basically said "that's nice, now here's a bunch of random fucking bullshit we pulled out of our asses having no clue what the class is about."

I've fucking hated Sev ever since.  Seriously, fucking months of messages and ideas being passed back and forth for damn near nothing.

We only had 3 kind of victories.  Less loss of hitpoints, you no longer have to kill yourself to get some power.  Some decent healing amp (which only goes so far since they ignored all our suggestions about revamping pots) and weapon bond is finally worth using since you no longer lose it switching weapons.

I took a break waiting for mabar (which never happened that year) and to see what they barb changes were going to be.  When they rolled it out, I logged in, took one look, said "are you fucking kidding me?" and didn't log back in to 2 and a half years.

5 Foot Step wrote on Sep 1^st, 2017 at 12:18pm:


TWF would be very much not a traditional barb   But that's kind of what I'm after this TR cycle.  I'm sick of the copy and past builds, I just want to get in there and fuck around and play with the builds, just have fun with this freaking game for a change.

Which is why I'm kind of frustrated with the barb trees right now.  They're so weirdly redundant with damage and hitpoints just arbitrarily flung around like so many eggs by a cracked up Easter Bunny. 

Ranger and Pally were really fun for me.  It was easy to pick out your core, then you had some flexibility to kind of fill in for your own playing style.  A rough draft toon was viable, then it came down to really trying to tighten it up to get what you wanted the most out of the build.

Barb looks like I'm really going to have to sit down and sort through all the redundancy and really plan out what's best to get the most out of the class.

Near as I can tell ravager really needs to be the core and then you can go more defensive with occult slayer or stack more damage with the berserker tree.  I'm thinking about two different builds, one life OS and one life FB, but I need to really plot out how much I need to put into ravager to know what's left over.

So, help break down this melee scaling thing for me (since it's new and I missed out on it).  For example, 3d6 damage scaling 100% with melee power.  Is that an additional 3d6 for every point in melee power?

crunch wrote on Sep 2^nd, 2017 at 12:17am:


Wow, that kind of sucks ass.  Haven't sorted through that, can a barb even hit that number in heroics?  So, it's an added percent then?  If your added damage was a 3, will 50 melee power give you an additional point of damage?

5 Foot Step wrote on Sep 2^nd, 2017 at 11:36am:


I was going to ask about that.  Is it bugged?  I grabbed it because I vaguely remember people raving about it and it's kind of nice, but there's no way they're staying down for 6 seconds (let alone the 12 I have it upgraded to).  Even if you count the falling down and getting up animations, they're out of service for maybe 2 seconds.  Basically as soon as they hit the ground they're standing right back up for me.

5 Foot Step wrote on Sep 2^nd, 2017 at 11:36am:


I'll have to try it.  My (formerly) main toon is a pure, epic barb.  None of the capstones really looked that impressive to me, so I just kind of randomly threw his points down on whatever looked half way interesting (didn't put really any thought into it since he's benched right now).

I'll tell you this though, he's a freaking unstoppable healing machine on anything but EE.  I noticed that when I was using him to farm for collectables, I could push through an epic hard quest without a healer or ever chugging a pot. 

It breaks down on epic elite, but his gear is also painfully outdated (at least 3 years old and nothing higher than level 25).  He has no PRR, MRR or SR to speak of and is missing easily 5-6 pts in dex, str and con that I could craft into gear now.  Pretty sure he's going to be a solid epic toon once I rework all his gear, but that's way more effort than I'm willing to put in right now.

5 Foot Step wrote on Sep 2^nd, 2017 at 11:36am:


Turbine's math is always...weird.  It might have been when I first started playing again that I looked at it, but I absolutely never thought for a second that melee power was on a single percentage scale of basically 1-100.  I honestly thought each point was going to be closer to a 3 or 4% boost to power.  A single percent kind of blows.