Playing one right now, str. I do so very little damage compared to nukers, and because i have to be in melee i get squashed way too often by a stray arrow hitting my pinky toe.

What am i doing wrong? Or is that par for the course for this shit?

5 Foot Step wrote on Aug 7^th, 2020 at 1:35am:

Level 30, working on getting the named gear shit. I do notice a huge improvement every time i get a part, but he still gets oneshotted more than i find acceptable while doing a lot less in comparison to most others.

Tempest is still good. It's just that the THFers are now king. You might like that more, and the higher prr/mrr is what you probably are after.

Junk's thread is still viable, gear might be different now a bit than from all the sets posted in that thread, but the thread is solid. Lot of good players posted there while playing tempests.

http://www.ddovault.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1533080274

You are always going to get 1 shot on a dps focussed toon. The trick is learning not to get hit as a melee. 300 PRR might save you a few times but you are still going to need to learn to use tools like meld, uncanny dodge, flight, spell absorb, cc etc.

Your survivability will increase greatly if you can provide your own cc like using flow for trash and not going max dps.

Lhynn wrote on Aug 6^th, 2020 at 12:50pm:


Tempest definately isnt good now because THF is just better. Tempest used to have the best melee AOE because of dance of death, then THF got strikethrough, except they deal more damage.

If you are at cap, your main issue is gear. End game content is all designed for people in full legendary gear with at least 2x set bonuses from ravenloft or sharn. Many people who talk about end game stats are doing it from the perspective of having almost all past lives and 100+ reaper AP, so the numbers might seem ridiculous to you, if you are new, you just have to work towards that goal slowly.

Aim for about 150 PRR first and enough reflex to no fail reflex saves with epic reflexes (should be a piece of cake if you are dex based). At minimum, try to get the silent avenger + adherent of the mists set bonuses if you can't get sharn set bonuses. You also want to make sure you stack as much CON and damage mitigation as possible.

At cap, you should have something like :

-20 or 25% concealment

-15% incorporeal

-Elusive target for additional 5% evade

-30% dodge

-Deflect arrows that can trigger every 2 seconds

The key is to have enough hp, PRR and damage mitigation so that when you do take a big hit, you survive long enough for someone to heal you.

If nobody is healing you, you are going to die, thats just how melee works which is why most people prefer to play ranged or casters. Nothing beats kiting a boss and taking 0 damage, or sitting on a safe spot. Meld is of course, a nice layer of defense, but you wont be able to use it for every wave.

Dont bother doing reaper levels that you cant handle, unless its your friends carrying you and they are fine with that. If you still need gear, focus on that first, do r1 for the first time bonus with a large party and subsequent farming runs on EE.

Throw some cheap melee power filis on your weapon, you dont want to waste rare filis in there since you wont be using it for long. Run in shadow dancer to remove sneak attack immunity.

If you just want to get your ranger lives out of the way, there are better options like Ranger 12/Rogue 6/Artificer 2 inquisitive. If you really want to do tempest because you have nightshard or something like that, at least use aasimar scourge to avoid the nightmare of leveling a tempest from level 1.

Also, dont expect to compete with nukers, the way they scale damage is completely different from melee/ranged, it is impossible to compete with them in kill speed until mid/high reaper. At anything below that, they will one shot an entire wave (or come close to it) before you can even get in melee range.

I usually find myself going all DPS then slowly trading off DPS for more survivability until I reach some compromise that I’m ok with.

Then I’ll read some technical game mechanics info on here and find out what i was doing was moronic and change it to some less moronic setup.

I feel I do pretty decent Dps just button pressing.  I’m just starting to do the weapon swap debuff  stuff. Making my 1st dust LGS and working in flow.    Many of my khopesh(s) are being phased out so I’m considering dropping the feat in place of another improved critical or something.

Trying a ton of weapon combinations. 

What method are you guys using to calculate DPS?  And when you mention a number in seconds when talking about DPS, what does that measure?  Usually like 30 sec or 27 secs?

Mattyo wrote on Aug 8^th, 2020 at 3:02pm:


https://github.com/Maetrim/DDOBuilder/releases

If you take the time to fully reproduce your build, this is very very good in my opinion. I just found it and have been doing all this stuff in my head forever. What I've been doing is setting up a build pretty meticulously here, taking the final stats/calcs and then building a spreadsheet that allows me to individually tweak variables to get a sense of contribution and where to min/max judiciously. That being said your point about go for full DPS and then peeling away layers to add defenses resonates with me a lot.

I just came back to the game after a long time out and did a Ranger 20 thrower. I knew about the higher DPS 11/6/3 builds but I liked how well rounded R20 was, and DPS was very high in any case. On FE's, of which I had like 8 or 9, damage was stupid. But I was dying a lot, part of which was lots of out of date gear, but also adjusting to a new meta where more stuff hit harder and Evasion wasn't easy button defense anymore.

I just TR'd into 9Rgr/9Clr/2Barb to pick up 6% DR when in FOTW, 190 Base HP (Cleric 5), 15% Armor Piercing (Cleric 9), even better off healing capabilities (Ranged Mass Cure from War Priest), self cast Mass CLW and Cure Crit, as well as permanent Vacuum on any weapon I wield (T2 Warpriest Ranged Smite), 10% move speed, Cha based Divine Might + Force of Personality mean all 3 of my max stats are save modifiers. The 11 levels of ranger I peeled off cost me a bit of FE damage, and 1 feat, (and the ability to be capstone in DWS which is nice but mostly a wash with Vistani). But I feel like I'll be alive a lot more with this build. If it's as good as I hope, I might even try swapping most of those cleric levels with more barbarian for Imp. Uncanny Dodge. Being able to hit a temp invincibility button + CC is totally worth it, and having multiple versions of that (Unncanny + Imp Uncanny, T4 Tempest elaborate, Mist Walker V from Vistani, Meld, etc) is way too much fun.

Mattyo wrote on Aug 8^th, 2020 at 3:02pm:


IMHO Flow isnt necessary unless you play in a static that has no other sources of vulnerability, or you really need guardbreaking to solo. Nightshard has the slow and thats enough to stop the occasional mob.

Mattyo wrote on Aug 8^th, 2020 at 6:52pm:

Purge is an attack damage debuff on the target. Lowering its offense, it does not apply any damage increase like dust or vacuum.

Mattyo wrote on Aug 8^th, 2020 at 6:25pm:

Fetters is what vacuum was on LGS weapons. Knight's Training is for battleaxe improved critical profile. Headmans Chop works on any axe.

Mattyo wrote on Aug 8^th, 2020 at 6:25pm:

If I could, yes, but there is no way to spend 26 points into your ED that is capped at 24.

Mattyo wrote on Aug 8^th, 2020 at 6:25pm:

https://ddocrafting.info/lgs/

Mattyo wrote on Aug 8^th, 2020 at 6:25pm:

Affirmation procs off of any hit. For healing I swap to Silverthread belt and my hamp stick.

Very helpful thread.
What i got out of it was "Gear up faggot." and "Yeah not in the best shape."

Justanotherlurker wrote on Aug 8^th, 2020 at 7:28am:


Wrong.

Lhynn wrote on Aug 9^th, 2020 at 11:43pm:


Welcome to the Vault!

It’s almost like Steelstar’s micropenis got needle hard at the thought of nerfing tempests to the point they were no longer useful for anything other than flavor.

That said, as long as jacktards like him are running things at SSG, this game is going to suffer from a never ending cycle of extremely unbalanced nerfs to combat previous extremely unbalanced nerfs because they’re entirely too fucking clueless to consider implementing any form of balance into classes or races.