My recent experience with a new alt

For the past week or so i played through the campaign again with my third character this league. This time poison arrow armour explosion Ranger. Certainly not a meta build but looked really fun.

I had some fitting uniques for levelling and despite my dislike of the campaign at this point playing through act 1 felt amazing. It was swift and felt smooth, nice punch to the skills. Imho what the default experience should feel like. Really has me worried that if no changes are made for 0.3. people experiencing the campaign from scratch as a "slog" will come bite GGG once again.

For the most part my build was able to keep up through the whole campaign but what really doesn't feel good at all is that at no point did i feel to get more powerful. If anything by act3 cruel my build was super twitchy and required way more "piano playing" to deal with the mobs. Also single target fell down a cliff from melting everything to kiting for 1-2 minutes.

Imho this is the result of a design flaw in the progression. Leveling only feels good when you can add a node that gives a dps boost. But you have to spent a lot of nodes for travel on the atlas tree and adding defenses. And each time this equals to a step back in players perceived power level.

Possible solutions imo: Nodes that offer a mix of offensive and defensive capabilities. Or lower level requirement for gear and leveling up skill gems.

The real bummer then was reaching the endgame. T1 maps were still ok but from T2 the build suddenly gets one shotted, which happend never even once during campaign and now has trouble to kill rares. It's a completely different game as other players have already stated before me.

The only solution that i see is to heavily invest in completely new gear from trade, which i currently don't have the currency for. My build requires too much specific stats to come online to be able to find or craft this in a reasonable time frame. This is kinda depressing. One of the problems is that the unique bow that i used during campaign doesn't have options for scaling dps. Quality and runes i've added days ago. Rare bows that would say double my physical dps go for like 20 div on the market and to find such bow in the wild is like winning lottery.

My verdict is there are other builds than LS that are fun to play but the progression in this game is super flawed right now and sucks the fun out of it eventually.

I tried too poison + corrosion + armour explosion.
Looks funny indeed.

However that build elements aren't synergistic.
If you go poison, you want to make poison stronger by taking all poison nodes, including poison duration, poison magnitude and +max poisons at target.
That's a lot of passives, and their only contribution to armour explosion is that it triggers faster, but that's about it.
Explosion remains weak.
Now you can remove fully broken armour with some skill that consumes it, then reapply it with poison again and get another explosion. But it's kinda too much of a work.
To make things worse, Deadly Poison support, that you likely want to use for your poison skill, is gonna reduce damage of Armour Explosion even further.

Honestly, at this point might as well remove explosion altogether and go full poison build.

Which I did. Added Plague Bearer, and build shines.
Monsters are dying like flies. Pathfinder's Contagious Contamination really helps with spreading big poisons from Plague Bearer.

And, pleasantly unexpectedly, Poisonous Concoction does a real damage.
It wasn't all that great before 0.2.0, but now that we have Salvo support, it hits like a truck.
You have to use it melee tho, so that randomized spread from Salvo doesn't affect you much. But damage is there, you use concoction on every second pack, letting it go to full 3 seals. And after that pack you have a Plague Bearer ready, to go for next pack. So you alternate these skills.

Survivability isn't great, but usually things die before they can harm you.
Eva/ES gear with Ghost Dance buff do help.

Some builds seem to take longer to come online than others, if they work at all since it's totally possible to make a nonviable build. I have found the act 3 normal viper napuatzi fight to be the peak difficulty for the campaign. Before that fight things mostly work regardless of how shitty your build is and after that your build is starting to come online and you have more tools at your disposal so cruel is actually reasonably easy.

Found out recently that Napuatzi's spearmen poke phase can be dodge-rolled back and forth, deals no damage.
Assuming you play WASD, you alternate dodge rolls in WA and SD directions for each poke.

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Cult_of_Resine#3258 が発言:

I have found the act 3 normal viper napuatzi fight to be the peak difficulty for the campaign.

Depends on what you play. She can go from above average in diificulty to trivial. I only struggled some with her with huntress and there she was nowhere the most difficult boss. With my Lich and Pathfinder she was no problem.